Matsuda Ryuhei: "I like to play people who constantly want to go out and kill people. They feel more comfortable for me somehow."

Since I've already started gushing about Matsuda Ryuhei on this blog, I figured I may as well do a whole post just about him ;)
The quote in the title is from this site (where you can also read a short bio). I shortened the title quote a bit cause it was just too long, so the full quote (which is somewhat less sensationalistic, but still amusing) is:
I like to play people who play video games all the time, or people who constantly want to go out and kill people. Those kind of roles enable me to pull out deep emotions of anger and grief, feelings I've experienced in the past. They feel more comfortable for me somehow.
There's not much material available about him in English (as is the case with most Japanese stars I think), so that site has pretty much the only English quotes of his that I found (but the title one is quite a gem, don't you think? ;) ).

I find Matsuda Ryuhei quite a curious case - I think largely because of my already mentioned fixation on his looks. This is weird in that he's the only actor I can think of, who I find cute because of his face ;-P (I'm not saying I never find actors cute, it's just that their face usually doesn't have much to do with it ;-P).
But it's not just that. It's the style of his acting too. He's restrained to a ridiculous degree (perhaps part of the reason why he likes and is good at playing the sort of characters he describes ;) ). For most of Gohatto (the only Ryuhei Matsuda film I've seen which actually makes me very ill qualified to write this post, but whatever ;-P) he's just there in a very upright pose, with almost no noticeable change of facial expression. The only time his expression changes is in one of the film's final scenes when he's about to kill someone (he laughs). For a demonstration, check out the trailer of Gohatto below:

Oddly enough, this sort of style works very well for Ryuhei (when Orlando Bloom does upright roles with no facial expression change he doesn't seem to be as lucky ;-P).
AFAIK, Ryuhei has done quite a few roles in that sort of style successfully. The trailer for Blue Spring looks similar, as does this hilarious scene from Izo (which has Ryuhei as a God-like figure ;) ).

But he has done some parts which sound like they're a bit "against type", which are naturally the reason I'm writing this post (they amuse me ;-P).
So there's a film which goes by the title Karaoke Terror (I kid you not), which is about a group of middle-aged karaoke loving women and a group of 20-something year old karaoke loving boys. One day, one of the boys tries to pick up one of the middle-aged women and to his surprise (he thought he was what they dreamed of) is turned down. In revenge he murders one of them in a very gory way, so they murder one of them in an even more gory way and so on (I assume it goes on until there is nobody left). There is a trailer on youtube (the trailer features only karaoke, no terror):


Another film which sounds "against Ryuhei type" is Koi No Mon, which is some sort of oddball, broad comedy and they're even going away from his effeminate looks (he's got facial hair in this ;) ):