Cast and Characters (Lost in Translation) Lost in Translation (2003)
Principal Cast
Bob Harris — Bill Murray
A fading American film star who has flown to Tokyo to shoot Suntory whisky commercials for a two-million-dollar fee. Bob is twenty-five years into a marriage conducted by fax, and Sofia Coppola wrote the part, openly, for Bill Murray — there is a long-circulated story that she would not have made the film if he had said no. Murray plays Bob almost entirely with face and posture, and the performance got him the only Oscar nomination of his career. See Bill Murray.
Charlotte — Scarlett Johansson
A recent Yale philosophy graduate accompanying her photographer husband on assignment in Tokyo, marooned in the Park Hyatt while he works, and quietly going to pieces about what she is supposed to do with her life. Scarlett Johansson was seventeen during principal photography; the film made her, in the space of about a year, the actor cinephiles took seriously. See Scarlett Johansson.
John — Giovanni Ribisi
Charlotte's husband, a celebrity photographer in Tokyo to shoot a band, who moves through the film treating his wife as an audience for his enthusiasm and an interruption to his work. Giovanni Ribisi gives John none of the cartoon-villain edges the part might have invited; he is simply a person whose attention is elsewhere. The character is widely reported to be at least loosely based on Coppola's then-husband Spike Jonze, a reading both Coppola and Jonze have declined to confirm or deny in any conclusive way. See Giovanni Ribisi.
Kelly — Anna Faris
A vapid American starlet in town for the press junket of an action film, who recognizes Bob in the Park Hyatt lobby, gushes at him, and tells Charlotte "not everybody went to Yale."b10 Anna Faris plays Kelly as a tightly drawn satirical sketch of millennial-era starlet PR; the character has been read for two decades as a thinly veiled portrait of Cameron Diaz, a charge Faris herself has declined to confirm. See The Anna Faris and Cameron Diaz Question. See Anna Faris.
Catherine — Catherine Lambert
The jazz lounge singer at the Park Hyatt's New York Bar whose set runs under several of the film's bar scenes and who eventually goes home with Bob. Catherine Lambert was a working Toronto-based jazz singer at the time and not, before this, a film actor; Coppola cast her after hearing her sing. The character is the rupture — the demonstration that Bob is not a saint of the bounded experience, which the post-midpoint approach has to absorb. See Catherine Lambert.
Tokyo Friends
Charlie Brown — Fumihiro Hayashi
The Japanese friend of John's who hosts the BB-gun apartment sceneb16 and pulls the night out into karaoke. The character is named after the actor's real-life nickname; Hayashi was a friend of Sofia Coppola's from her years moving between Tokyo and New York fashion circles, and his "God Save the Queen" karaoke turn is a faithful re-staging of something Coppola had seen him do years earlier.
Ms. Kawasaki — Akiko Takeshita
The Suntory production coordinator who shepherds Bob through the shoot, hands him gifts, and stands politely through the long takes where the director's instructions are compressed into a sentence by the interpreter.b4
Premium Fantasy Woman — Nao Asuka
The hostess sent to Bob's suite by Mr. Kazu, whose demand that he "lip my stocking" turns the bedroom into a long awkward sketch about translation collapse.b11
Mr. Kazu — Takashi Fujii
The Suntory client whose courtesy gift is the premium-fantasy delivery.
Matthew Minami — Takashi Fujii
The manic surrealist host of the Japanese variety show Bob is booked onto.b28 Fujii plays both Mr. Kazu and Matthew Minami; the doubling is rarely noticed and is a small Coppola joke about the indistinguishability of faces in a foreign register.
Suntory Director — Yutaka Tadokoro
The director on the whisky shoot whose long animated Japanese instructions are reduced to a sentence by the interpreter.b4
Lauren — voice of Catherine Lambert (uncredited)
Charlotte's friend on the other end of the phone for the shrine callb5 and the Kyoto follow-up.b24 The voice is heard but never seen.
Lydia Harris — voice of Nancy Steiner
Bob's wife back in the United States, present in the film entirely as a fax cover sheet, a FedEx package of carpet swatches, and a voice on a phone. Steiner was the film's costume designer and Coppola's friend; the voice casting was deliberate.
Coppola assembled the cast through a small personal network
Sofia Coppola wrote the Bob Harris role for Murray and pursued him for nearly a year, leaving messages with intermediaries that often went unreturned. Scarlett Johansson was cast on the strength of Manny & Lo (1996) and Ghost World (2001); Coppola wanted, on her account, "a husky voice and that kind of presence" that would make Charlotte read as older than Johansson's seventeen years. Giovanni Ribisi she had known socially. Anna Faris arrived through casting director Ellen Chenoweth. Catherine Lambert was discovered when Coppola heard her sing at the Park Hyatt's New York Bar, the actual room where the film's bar scenes are set.