The squinting gunslinger of the spaghetti western and the battle-hardened Jedi both trace back to one man who never wanted to act. This episode follows Toshiro Mifune from his birth in 1920 in Qingdao, China, to Japanese Methodist missionary parents, through his youth in his father's photography studio and his wartime service as an aerial photographer, to the 1947 Toho new faces contest he entered only because the camera department was full. Asked to act angry, he unleashed what Akira Kurosawa later described as a wounded beast trying to break loose, lost the contest, and was rescued by Kurosawa's intervention.

We explore how their 16-film collaboration in works like Seven Samurai, Rashomon, and Yojimbo shattered the powdered, kabuki-influenced samurai stereotype, how Mifune studied footage of lions rather than other actors, and why Kurosaw ...