Hidetoshi Nishijima on Season 1, Masa’s Future – MASHAHER

SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers for the entire first season of “Sunny,” now streaming on Apple TV+.

As a Japanese actor, Hidetoshi Nishijima often receives offers to play morally gray characters, such as samurais and yakuza members, who are defined by a particular profession and era. But then he was approached for the role of a roboticist whose mysterious disappearance leaves his wife (and the clever robotic companion he designed for her) at the center of a criminal conspiracy in “Sunny,” Apple TV+’s darkly comedic, sci-fi thriller that just wrapped up its first season. Nishijima — who starred in “Drive My Car,” the 2021 Japanese film that was nominated for best picture, and won the Academy Award for international feature — relished the opportunity to play an ordinary man who must wrestle with existential questions about what it means to be human.

“Of course, his profession is a big part of this project, but the most important part is that he is a normal man and he falls in love with a woman, gets married and then builds his own family, and then he just faces this unexpected thing,” Nishijima tells Variety through a Japanese interpreter. “I think the important part of this show is that it talks about love and anxiety and the unknown, so this is basically a human story. That’s the part that appealed to me.”

Based on Colin O’Sullivan’s 2018 novel “The Dark Manual,” and created for television by Katie Robbins (who is also behind a new Hulu limited series starring “Grey’s Anatomy” star Ellen Pompeo), “Sunny” follows Suzie Sakamoto (Rashida Jones), an American expat living in Kyoto, Japan, whose world is turned upside down when her husband Masa (Nishijima) and their son Zen (Fares Belkheir) both vanish in a supposed plane crash. In the wake of their disappearance, a grief-stricken Suzie is given Sunny (voiced by Joanna Sotomura), one of a new class of domestic robots made by Masa’s electronics company ImaTech, which she gradually begins to lean on for support — and uses to uncover what really happened to her family.

Prior to beginning production on “Sunny,” Nishijima says, in all the years he has worked in Japan, he had never been able to shoot in the middle of Kyoto, where officials, in keeping with the long-standing Japanese tradition of preserving cultural traditions and artifacts, are very selective about which projects can be filmed in the city. In addition to shooting in Tokyo, the cast and crew of “Sunny” were able to shoot at some of the major landmarks in Kyoto — including Yasaka Pagoda, the cobblestone road of Ninenzaka, and the historic Kyoto International Conference Center.

Showrunner Robbins and executive producer/director Lucy Tcherniak, who developed much of the adaptation together, “had such a deep respect for Japanese culture — they studied Japanese music, Japanese movies — so that’s why they were accepted by the people,” Nishijima says. Because “Sunny” is told from an outsider’s — and specifically Suzie’s American — point of view, “there may be some parts about Japan that are a little bit exaggerated, but they never ridiculed it. The purpose was not to make fun of it. They have such respect, and I felt it. That’s another reason that I wanted to work with them.”

For Nishijima, “Sunny” also represented an opportunity to work with Jones, whose comedic work he had previously watched. “She is really natural as an actor, and she loves spontaneous things, so if something unexpected happens, she embraces it — and that’s the same with me too,” he notes. “We did the first table read on Zoom, but even from that time, we were laughing with each other, there was so much chemistry, and we had so much fun. She just has such intelligence and a sense of humor and generosity that I felt even before I actually met her in person. And when I met her in person in Los Angeles and it was really true, I really wanted to work with her.”

Nishijima quickly signed on to play the lead opposite Jones, who had also boarded the project as an executive producer. But having established himself in the last two decades as one of the most in-demand actors working in Japan, Nishijima says he had very limited availability to shoot his part in the series, which explains why Masa occupies such a small part of the story in the 10-episode first season.

“The initial idea is that we show these flashback scenes, and in the flashback scenes, Masa is a very nice, gentle father and husband, but then Suzie finds out what he was really hiding,” says Nishijima. “But while we were shooting, Katie started adding more and more about Masa as a character: First of all, why did Masa build Sunny, the robot, to basically commit murder later? What was the reason he needed to build the robot? So if my availability allowed more, we would have talked more and explored more about his life. I wish we could do that.”

Nevertheless, Nishijima sought to make the most of his limited time on the series, telling his character’s backstory exclusively in flashbacks. The eighth episode, titled “Trash or Not-Trash,” reveals Masa’s origin story. For two-and-a-half years after the death of his emotionally distant father, Masa locked himself in his bedroom, playing video games and working remotely as a computer engineer for ImaTech. In a last-ditch effort to get her son out of his rut, Masa’s mother Noriko (Judy Ongg) enlists the help of Yuki Tanaka (Jun Kunimura), who reveals to Masa that he is actually his biological father.

Yuki offers to let Masa stay at his cabin on Lake Biwa, where he leaves behind a badly programmed trash-collecting robot — named Trashbot — for Masa to reprogram over the course of a few weeks. In doing so, Masa is able to feel less lonely and rediscover his sense of purpose, and he grows to believe that robots can be used to help humans discover their own humanity.

The penultimate episode, titled “Who’s in the Box?” and structured as a hallucinatory game show in Sunny’s subconscious memory, reveals further details about what led Masa to create the line of homebots in the first place. After helping consolidate ImaTech’s dominance in the refrigerator market, Masa became convinced that, in the same way that the Trashbot helped him, domestic homebots could be made sophisticated enough to help reclusive people reintegrate into society. What he didn’t anticipate, however, was that these robots, including Sunny, could be programmed — or maybe even sentient — enough to commit murder on their own. (The ambiguity of the cause of Sunny’s growing propensity for violence is the dramatic tension that powers the second half of the season, and it remains an open question after the finale.)

“Masa closed his emotions for a while, but then because of that robot, he could release his emotions, he could connect again. That’s why he thought that maybe a robot can be something that can help humans, but the robot he makes starts having a little bit of consciousness,”  Nishijima says. “Masa believed that eventually technology should help people communicate with each other, so that was his ideal. I also think that this series itself really shows the hope in this world [about] what technology can do, and I would like to have this hope as well.”

Nishijima points out that humans have long had a tendency to anthropomorphize inanimate objects, especially when they are lonely. “I really think that a long time ago, when people started making some traditional, simple dolls, maybe humans just found some soul when they saw a human shape, so maybe they reacted differently,” he says.

Sotomura, who voices Sunny, performed with a high-tech piece of headgear that allowed her to provide the robot with her voice and facial expressions, which were projected in real time onto the animatronic’s face. Although the Trashbot did not use the same technology and was controlled manually by the crew, Nishijima notes that a simple change in the position of a robot’s head made him react and occasionally forget that he wasn’t interacting with a real person. “I just started seeing the soul, so [those little movements] made a big difference,” he says.

While Suzie is able to reunite with Zen in the finale, Masa’s whereabouts are still unknown. Nishijima insists that he has yet to hear anything concrete about Masa’s fate, let alone about the prospect of a second season, although he concedes that “we see some surprising person doing something mysterious” in the final minutes of the finale. For now, he is more interested in discussing the show’s biggest questions.

“This show has a lot of mystery, but also talks about some philosophical questions such as, ‘What is a soul? And can a robot have a soul? And then, what is the future like for technology and human beings?’” Nishijima asks rhetorically. “So I would like the audience to enjoy the show, but at the same time if they can explore that kind of theme with us, that’d be great.” 

“Sunny” is the latest screen project to explore the ethical concerns surrounding artificial intelligence — one of the most rapidly evolving issues that affects nearly every industry, but remains particularly pertinent to the creation of art following last year’s dual Hollywood strikes. For Nishijima, the series delves into the double-edged sword of technology, which can simultaneously connect and isolate its users.

“In my own life, I try to be very careful when I’m bringing in a new technology. I try to think, ‘Is this bringing any bad influence or not?’” Nishijima says. “So I think that each individual now really has to think about it when you’re bringing some new technology into the household. I think that big change will be coming — and that is scary. But at the same time, we cannot stop it.

“When I was in high school — so that’s a long time ago — my father was studying about the very early stages of AI. So I remember he was saying that, ultimately, studying AI is about studying humans. I think it’s true because as AI progresses, we cannot help but wonder what it means to be human. In the past, we thought something like art is something only humans can make, but now AI is going to do a similar thing that a human can do, so we cannot anticipate what kind of future awaits.”