Actresses Anna Sawai, Mari Yamamoto back to face Godzilla in Monarch: Legacy Of Monsters 2

LOS ANGELES – Honouring its Japanese source material, the American Godzilla series Monarch: Legacy Of Monsters (2023 to present) features dozens of Japanese cast and crew members.

Most prominent are Anna Sawai as the show’s Japanese-American protagonist Cate Randa and Mari Yamamoto as brilliant Japanese scientist and Godzilla expert Keiko Miura.

Fluent in both English and Japanese, the actresses – who reprise their roles in Season 2, which debuts on Apple TV on Feb 27 – are rising stars in Hollywood.

Sawai, 33, was the first Asian performer to win an Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series for the historical drama Shogun (2024), while Yamamoto, 40, scored her breakout with the acclaimed comedy-drama film Rental Family (2025).

And Yamamoto believes having Japanese people in Hollywood productions like these brings a distinct vibe and “thoughtfulness” to the set.

Speaking to The Straits Times at a recent press event in Los Angeles, she says that when Monarch: Legacy Of Monsters 2 was filming in Australia, she, Sawai and their Japanese co-stars frequently spent time together outside of work, often over a Japanese meal.

Their group included veteran actor Takehiro Hira (Shogun; Snake Eyes, 2021), who plays Cate’s father Hiroshi, and newcomer Ren Watabe, who portrays her half-brother Kentaro.

And the rest of the crew praised the Japanese contingent’s positive attitude overall.

Recalls Yamamoto, who grew up in Tokyo and London and studied at the famous Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute in New York: “In Australia, a lot of them would often say to us, ‘You guys are a really nice bunch.’

“And I tend to agree. Everyone’s really nice on this cast.”

Like Sawai, she has appeared in the historical drama Pachinko (2022 to 2024), a Hollywood production set in Japan and Korea.

Asked if this affected the mood on set, Yamamoto nods.

“There’s a conscientiousness and a thoughtfulness that Japanese people generally bring, and that sort of permeates.”

“In terms of our exports, I think Japanese thoughtfulness is one of the best things, so I think we had that on set,” adds the performer, who previously worked in Tokyo as a reporter for American news site The Daily Beast before being hired as a consultant on the US crime drama Tokyo Vice (2022 to 2024).

Monarch: Legacy Of Monsters takes place in the so-called Monsterverse – a fictional universe shared by Godzilla and King Kong – and the series begins with San Francisco schoolteacher Cate and her half-brother trying to find their missing father.

They then discover a world of giant monsters, known as Titans, and learn that generations of their family have been studying them for a covert organisation known as Monarch.

Season 2 will see the fate of Monarch – and humanity – on a knife-edge, with Godzilla and Kong both making an appearance.

The show references the events of the 2014 film Godzilla, where Godzilla battles two other Titans and wreaks havoc in San Francisco.

Cate, a survivor of this so-called G-Day attack, is traumatised by her brush with Godzilla.

But Sawai feels at home with the ancient sea creature, which first appeared in 1954’s Godzilla, the iconic Japanese film that launched the franchise.

Sawai, who was born in New Zealand but moved at age 10 to Japan, where she still lives, has been surrounded by Godzilla stories since childhood.

“I feel like Godzilla is such a big thing in Japan, so you just kind of grow up with it. It’s like Mickey Mouse – it’s just there,” she says at a separate event in Los Angeles.

Doing action-packed scenes with these computer-generated beasts “is a lot”, adds Sawai, who is set to play Japanese musician Yoko Ono in an ambitious four-film Beatles biopic series by English director Sam Mendes in 2028.

“These monsters are huge, and you have to run away from them or be face to face, and you’re looking up into the sky, so it’s a lot of imagination.”

At the same time, these fantastical storylines are grounded in very human problems – and characters trying not to be consumed by family secrets and legacies.

“In a way, it’s real, what’s happening to these characters in the non-monster world, so I think people are going to be able to relate,” says Sawai.