Well, I had a thread half written up for this week but in order to make my life more difficult I decided to do a quick new post the day before this goes live based on current events. And in today’s case the event is the passing of Cary Hiroyuki Tagawa, a character actor spanning decades that has worked in a lot of genre faire and a lot of interesting projects in TV, movies and even as a result of movie work video games (more on that in a bit, though I suspect most know where I am going with this).

Cary was in a fair amount of movies but what strikes people most about him is his screen presence. When he is there on screen you can almost feel it. Often playing villains he oozed menace to a level few other actor’s were capable of achieving. There is a fair chance everyone you know has seen him in something and an equally fair chance they remember him, because he had the presence that one just remembers. They may not know his name, but when you see him on screen most everyone will say some variation of “hey it’s that guy!”. In particular I will highlight Mortal Kombat which I have stated here many times that I think is a great movie, and I do think it is great in no small part due to Tagawa’s performance as the main villain Shang Tsung (I mean that movie was great for other reasons, but this is what we are talking about today). 100% invested, super intense, and just owning the role right out of the gate he made the role his so much that he was cast later in Mortal Kombat video games, and it takes a high level of Gravitas to influence not only the movie you are in, but other franchise entries based around how well you performed a role, now that is a Flawless Victory.

So in that spirit this week’s prompt is going to be a twofer this week: “What is your favourite performance by an actor that elevates the movie and all those around them, or conversely what performance was so great that it solidified a role for an actor?”