Suit Actor Mark Musashi on Stunt Work, GARO, and Kamen Rider the First

Mark Musashi built a career in Japanese tokusatsu and action television as a stuntman before moving into acting roles, most visibly as the suit performer for Kamen Rider 2 in the 2005 film Kamen Rider the First and as Kodama in GARO. In an interview conducted mid-career, he described the path that took him from a small town in Maine to the Japanese stunt industry.

Musashi is half-Japanese, half-American, born in Japan but raised in Buckfield, Maine, a nearly all-white rural town where he said growing up made him more conscious of his Japanese heritage rather than less. He studied East Asian Languages and Literatures with a Drama minor at Dartmouth College, and in his senior year traveled to China with fellow members of the Dartmouth Kung Fu Club to train for five months under a teacher connected to actor Yu Cheng-Hui. He called it the most physically grueling stretch of his life, and the point where martial arts became a permanent fixture rather than a hobby.

His first exposure to tokusatsu came on a childhood family trip to Japan, where he caught broadcasts of Bioman and Space Sheriff Shaider, genre television he’d never seen in the United States. Shaider remained a personal favorite despite its reputation as the weakest entry in the Space Sheriff series, and he credited it as the reason he got into martial arts and stunt work at all.

Musashi broke into the industry after a Wacoal underwear commercial that needed motion-capture work; a demonstration with the Tokyo Wushu Team led to the booking, and the shoot led to an introduction to action coordinator Mitsuo Abe, who invited him to train with the AAC Stunts team. AAC was a small outfit, eight members total with six based in Japan, and Musashi described fellow stuntman Namihei Koshige, frequently cast as a female Ranger, as one of the most talented performers he’d worked alongside.

On the technical side of suit acting, Musashi said he generally played characters as retaining their offscreen personality after transformation rather than becoming a different, more “invincible” persona, a philosophy he applied across the seven different actors who shared the role of Saijima Koga in GARO. He pointed to a wire-heavy fight sequence against Zero in GARO’s seventh episode as work he was proud of and frustrated to see dismissed by viewers as “just CGI,” noting it took roughly two and a half days to film and left him collapsed from dehydration at one point.

Landing the role of Kamen Rider 2 in Kamen Rider the First came down to build, since AAC had few performers with the right height and frame for the character, and Musashi said he’d seen several modern Kamen Rider series beforehand, naming Ryuki as his favorite followed by Agito. He got to meet Hassei Takano, the film’s human lead, along with co-stars Masaya Kikawada and Eiji Wentz during production, and said he stayed in touch with Takano afterward.

Asked about his ambitions beyond stunt work, Musashi said acting was always the deeper passion behind the physical training, and that he was weighing a future attempt at working in the United States despite the career reset that would likely require.