Hiroyuki Sanada & Cosmo Jarvis To Lead FX’s Samurai Limited Series ‘Shōgun’

FX has been attempting to put together a new limited series adaptation of the James Clavell novel “Shōgun” for a couple of years now but kept running into bad luck and obstacles, between various development hiccups and last year’s pandemic, which led to further delays on the series that takes place in feudal Japan.

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However, things are finally being pushed into gear. Deadline reports that veteran Japanese actor Hiroyuki Sanada (“The Last Samurai“) has been selected to play Lord Yoshi Toranaga, and British actor Cosmo Jarvis (“Lady Macbeth“) is set for the role of shipwrecked English sailor John Blackthorne. Blackthorne is forced to jump headfirst into a culture of politics and honor that is not entirely welcoming of foreigners trying to rub shoulders with the country’s powerbrokers. 

Justin Marks (“The Jungle Book“) and Rachel Kondo are writing the series to explore Western and Japanese perspectives.

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They still have yet to announce who will be playing Lady Mariko, the third major role in “Shōgun,” and should have an equal part to play in the samurai drama as the two gentlemen mentioned above. Production will begin this August in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. There originally had been plans to shoot on location in Japan, but the Summer Olympics, hosted in Japan, have squashed that.

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This won’t be the first television adaptation, as “Shōgun” was originally turned into a miniseries by NBC in 1980 that starred Richard Chamberlain as Blackthorne, the legendary Toshirô Mifune as Lord Toranaga, and Yôko Shimada as Lady Mariko.

Sanada should be extremely familiar to audiences since he has been focusing mostly on western projects such as “Army of The Dead,” “Westworld,” “The Wolverine,” “Avengers: Endgame,” and the “Mortal Kombat” reboot. 

Cosmo Jarvis might not be a household name at the moment or as popular as Sanada. Still, you’ve likely seen him show up in things like Alex Garland‘s sci-fi thriller “Annihilation,” “Peaky Blinders,” “Calm with Horses,” and most recently in Ridley Scott‘s HBO Max series “Raised By Wolves.”

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Speaking of related Toshirô Mifune projects, this isn’t the only high-profile samurai series on the horizon. Bryan Cogman is developing a television adaptation of Akira Kurosawa‘s classic “Yojimbo” for eOne that Mifune starred in. Cogman was recently behind expensive series such as HBO‘s “Game of Thrones” and Amazon‘s soft-reboot “Lord of The Rings” series.