Viewers were on the edges of their seats during the tense altercation (Picture: FX/Disney Plus)
Warning: spoilers ahead for Shōgun episode 9.
For weeks, FX’s series Shōgun on Disney Plus has left viewers around the world gripped as they anxiously wait to find out what’s going to happen to Toranaga, Blackthorne and Mariko.
The latest instalment of the show, episode 9, is undoubtedly one of the most heartbreaking… with the ending leaving fans worried over the possible fate of one of the drama’s most popular characters – Mariko (Anna Sawai).
Metro.co.uk was fortunate enough to have the chance to speak to Anna, Shōgun producer Eriko Miyagawa and showrunners Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks about the pivotal turning point in Mariko’s story, which saw her take on a horde of weapon-wielding men while being kept captive by warlord Ishido (Takehiro Hira), before being caught up in a horrifying explosion.
It turns out that while filming the action sequence where Mariko masterfully brandishes a naginata – a Japanese weapon with a blade on the end of a long pole – Anna actually chipped her tooth because of the incredible effort she put into the scene.
‘When we were shooting the scene where Mariko leaves the castle and she fights with the dozens of men, I didn’t even know that I was chipping a tooth,’ Anna told us.
Anna has received critical acclaim for her performance (Picture: Michael Tran / AFP)
‘I was doing it with all the might that I had in my body because I usually like to play it safe. I like to take my distance, I like to make sure that no one’s getting hurt – but the stunt guy who was in front of me was a pretty big man and he was like, “I’m not backing up if you don’t come towards me with more energy – close up the distance.”
‘So I think that kind of triggered something in me and I was like, “I’m gonna do this!”’
The next morning, Anna woke up… only to realise that her tooth was ‘kind of chipped’.
‘I called the production and I was like, “I think we need to fix this for the next couple of scenes,”’ the Fast and Furious star quipped light-heartedly.
Producer Eriko stressed how much of a ‘trooper’ and ‘hard worker’ Anna is, having already been athletic and had performance experience from her time in the J-pop group Faky.
The actress underwent ‘gruelling’ training for the nail-biting scene (Picture: FX/Disney Plus)
‘It was her first time acting in a Japanese period show wearing this specific type of kimono, working with this very specific weapon that required such specific movement and doing all of that while speaking both languages, putting on an accent,’ she said.
‘She started training one month before she left for Vancouver, so it was a long, long process.’
Rachel, who co-created the 2024 adaptation of James Clavell’s Shōgun novel with her husband Justin, described Anna’s episode nine fight scene as ‘pretty physically demanding’.
Justin added: ‘That scene, my memory of that – it took us like three, four days to shoot that scene and which is forever in television time. There are TV shows that spend that amount of time on the whole episode.
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‘I don’t think she’d ever been as focused as she was on that day in between tapes. She didn’t really go back to the tent. Didn’t take a break. She just sort of stood there on set as everyone lit and moved around her, which was very Mariko-like.’
Rachel recalled how it was as though ‘Anna herself kind of disappeared’ during the ‘gruelling’ shoot, which ‘required so much of her physically, emotionally and spiritually’.
After Mariko is forced to stay under the watchful eye of Toranaga’s rival Ishido, she and Blackthorne (Cosmo Jarvis) face an incursion in the night carried out by masked assassins.
They attempt to barricade themselves in a storage room– but once Mariko realises their attackers are going to blow the doors open, she stands right in front of it, sacrificing herself to save others while also knowing the ramifications her death would have on the war.
The ending of episode nine sees Blackthorne look on in horror at what’s about to unfold, as the final moments of the instalment shows an ethereal shot of Mariko blasting in the direction of the camera – a filming technique that was achieved using a Phantom camera.
Cosmo Jarvis’ Blackthorne can do nothing but watch as Mariko sacrifices herself (Picture: Kurt Iswarienko/FX)
Discussing the powerful ending of the episode, Justin said: ‘I’m glad you bring that up, because it was a really interesting conversation in the edit. We jump out of order there in terms of the chronology.
‘You see the explosion from the side and from the outside, and then you come to her face with the moment where we hit her with a dust hit from behind, the Phantom camera, which shoots it in an incredibly high frame rate of 1,000 per second, shot her hair out and everything.
‘Instead of inserting that shot chronologically, we stuck it at the end, I think one or two shots before black.’
Justin pointed out that when people go through traumatic experiences, they might not remember things in the order that they actually happened – ‘we remember things as we want to remember them, and we forget what we don’t want to remember’.
So in this particular instance, the episode ending on the shot of Mariko’s face after the blast was demonstrating the way that ‘Blackthorne experiences that moment, so that what we’re looking at is the memory of her’.
Anna recalled how ‘technical’ the ending scene was to shoot, as there were three different portions – the dialogue, the moment where Mariko is at the door with the Phantom camera being used to blow her hair up from the back, and the interactions with the other cast members in the storage room.
Mariko has been a fan-favourite character since the start of Shōgun (Picture: Katie Yu/FX)
‘I don’t know if I had enough time to be sentimental about the character in those moments just because there was a lot that we needed to get covered,’ she shared.
‘Episode one to the end of eight, I felt stuck shooting a lot of the time, and I think it was because Mariko was also stuck. At one point she loses the will to even keep going and she asks permission to take her own life, but then once she connects the dots, she has so much more conviction.’
The Pachinko actress continued: ‘Shooting nine, now that I think about it, I feel like I kind of felt the same way. It was like, I know what I need to do. In scenes where there is frustration, I was feeling frustrated. I think I was going through a very similar mindset as Mariko, so I really felt good about it.’
FX’s Shōgun is available to watch on Disney Plus with new episodes released on Tuesdays.
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