Takehiro Hira (Rental Family) Rental Family

Takehiro Hira plays Shinji Tada, the owner and operator of the Rental Family agency. Shinji occupies the film's moral gray zone -- he genuinely believes the service helps people, but he also profits from deception, and the film's most devastating confession (beat 32) reveals that his own wife and teenage son are rental actors. Hira brings the same controlled intensity to Shinji that made him one of the most in-demand Japanese actors working in both hemispheres. (wikipedia, deepfocusreview)

He trained at Brown and Columbia before returning to Japan for acting

Hira was born in Setagaya, Tokyo, to actors Mikijiro Hira and Yoshiko Sakuma -- Japanese theater royalty. He grew up in Japan until fifteen, then attended Moses Brown School in Providence, Rhode Island, before earning his undergraduate degree at Brown University and attending Columbia University graduate school. He initially entered the business world at SoftBank before leaving to pursue acting, making his theatrical debut in 2002 in Yukio Mishima's Rokumeikan. (wikipedia)

His breakthrough came in Yukio Ninagawa's production of Hamlet at the Barbican in London, where he was discovered for international work. He played the last shogun, Yoshinobu Tokugawa, in the NHK taiga drama Atsuhime. In 2019, he starred in the lead role of the British TV series Giri/Haji, and in 2024 he appeared in FX's Shogun, earning a Primetime Emmy nomination. (wikipedia)

Reviewers praised his restraint as the counterweight to Fraser's warmth

Brian Eggert at Deep Focus Review identified the performance balance at the center of the film: Fraser's broad, warm American energy against the more restrained Japanese cast. Hira's Shinji anchors the ensemble, playing the businessman with a quiet authority that keeps the audience uncertain about his motives until the confession scene demolishes his composure. (deepfocusreview)

Shinji's confession in beat 32 -- that his family is rented -- is the film's structural hinge. Every scene featuring Shinji before that revelation reads differently afterward: his professional detachment was not authority but self-protection, his insistence on rules was not managerial discipline but a man enforcing boundaries he could not maintain in his own life. Hira plays the confession as collapse rather than revelation, which is what makes it land.

His bilingual background mirrors the film's cross-cultural structure

Hira's personal history -- educated in both Japanese and American systems, fluent in both languages, son of Japanese actors but trained at Ivy League universities -- maps onto Rental Family's own cross-cultural architecture. The film operates between Japanese and American emotional registers, and Hira's Shinji is the character who bridges them, managing an agency that serves Japanese cultural needs with an American employee.