Ken Watanabe cast as the baddie in Christopher Nolan’s “Inception”

Precious little is known about Christopher Nolan’s upcoming contemporary sci-fi film Inception other than the initial blurb describing it as being “set within the architecture of the mind”, but cast additions have shed a little bit of light on the relationship of the characters to each other. Today two more cast members were announced: Tom Hardy (Star Trek: Nemesis, Bronson) as a member of Leonardo DiCaprio’s team and Ken Watanabe as the main villain who’s trying to blackmail DiCaprio.

The pair join a cast which stars DiCaprio as a CEO, Ellen Page as his grad student sidekick, Joseph Gordon-Levitt as his business associate, and Marion Cotillard as his wife. Cillian Murphy and Michael Caine also have roles, but details about them haven’t been announced yet.

Watanabe has seen his star rise on two continents since co-starring with Tom Cruise in the bizarrely inaccurate, yet generally entertaining Hollywood film The Last Samurai in 2003. Since then he’s been bouncing back and forth between high-profile Japanese and Hollywood film projects like Memoirs of a Geisha and Letters from Iwo Jima. In 2007 he took home an elusive Japanese Academy Award for his potrayal of a successful executive stricken with early onset Alzheimer’s disease in Yukihiko Tsutsumi’s Memories of Tomorrow, breaking a string of fruitless nominations over the years.

Inception will actually be Watanabe’s second villainous role in a Nolan film, after having played the enigmatic Ra’s Al Ghul in 2005’s Batman Begins. Here’s hoping he gets a little more actual screen time in this one.

Source: THR via /Film

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