Ryuusei Ryo

Ryuusei Ryo plays Daigo Kiryuu, Kyoryu Red, the leader of the five-member team in Zyuden Sentai Kyoryuger, originally announced under the working title Juuden Sentai Kyoryuger. His casting was confirmed by his talent agency, Ken-On, in the second cast-reveal announcement for the series, which followed an earlier reveal naming the actor who would play Kyoryu Black. At the time, the remaining three Ranger actors had not yet been rumored or confirmed, so Ryuusei was for a stretch one of only two publicly known members of the eventual five-person team. Before landing the lead role, he had already built a résumé in Japanese television drama, with his best-known prior credit being Ouran High School Host Club.

A year into the show’s run, Ryuusei sat down with co-star Saito Syuusuke, who plays Kyoryu Black (Ian Yorkland), for a joint interview with Hero Vision magazine built around the two actors’ off-screen friendship. Both were twenty years old at the time, in a cast whose other members spanned more than a decade older, a gap that appears to have shaped how closely the two of them bonded on set relative to the rest of the team. The interview traced the turning point in Daigo and Ian’s on-screen relationship back to the show’s fourth episode, when Ian’s guarded backstory is revealed to Daigo. Rather than let that guardedness keep them apart, Daigo pushes past it, and the two become friends from that point on.

Ryuusei credited Syuusuke’s bluntness and dependability, the same traits that carry Ian’s character arc toward becoming the team’s trusted second-in-command, as the real qualities that made their friendship work off camera as much as it does on screen for their characters. The two actors’ account of each other stayed affectionate rather than analytical for most of the conversation. They traded gentle jabs about each other’s habits: Ryuusei’s competitive streak came up more than once, set against Syuusuke’s tendency to drop an argument only to bring it back later in a slightly different form. Both described a friendship that carried on well past the set, including regular visits to each other’s homes and casual games of darts together, framing it as an ordinary part of their week rather than something staged for the interview.

Asked whether the on-screen chemistry between Daigo and Ian had been built deliberately by the writers or had simply carried over from how the two actors already got along, Ryuusei and Syuusuke landed on the same answer: the bond between the characters grew out of the real friendship, not the other way around. That answer also doubles as a fair description of how Ryuusei talked about the role generally across the interview. Rather than treating Daigo’s on-screen leadership and loyalty as something built from technique alone, he kept pointing back to his actual relationship with Syuusuke as the thing that made the character’s central friendship believable to him, a working style grounded in genuine rapport with a scene partner rather than one built in isolation.

Taken together with the earlier casting announcement, the two pieces bracket a specific stretch of Ryuusei’s early career: a young actor moving from supporting drama work into a lead role on a long-running tokusatsu series, cast alongside three actors more than a decade his senior, and finding his footing on set largely through the one relationship, with Syuusuke, that the two of them describe as having come easily from the start.