The squinting gunslinger of the spaghetti western and the battle-hardened Jedi both trace back to one man who never wanted to act. This episode follows Toshiro Mifune from his birth in 1920 in Qingdao, China, to Japanese Methodist missionary parents, through his youth in his father’s photography studio and his wartime service as an aerial photographer, to the 1947 Toho new faces contest he entered only because the camera department was full. Asked to act angry, he unleashed what Akira Kurosawa later described as a wounded beast trying to break loose, lost the contest, and was rescued by Kurosawa’s intervention.

We explore how their 16-film collaboration in works like Seven Samurai, Rashomon, and Yojimbo shattered the powdered, kabuki-influenced samurai stereotype, how Mifune studied footage of lions rather than other actors, and why Kurosawa said he could convey in three feet of film what other actors needed ten feet to express. We also cover his phonetically memorized Spanish performance in Mexico, the Hollywood roles he turned down including Darth Vader and Obi-Wan Kenobi, the two-year Red Beard shoot that bankrupted his production company and ended his partnership with Kurosawa, and the generous, disciplined professional he was off camera.

• How photography and aerial reconnaissance built the spatial awareness behind his physical acting
• The three-feet-of-film metric and why his emotional shifts read faster than anyone else’s
• Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name as a direct descendant of Mifune’s wandering ronin
• Why he rejected James Bond and Star Wars to avoid East-West cliches
• Catered parties for crews, mentoring Scott Glenn on The Challenge, and his 1980 Shogun fame in America