‘I went for it!’: Shōgun’s Cosmo Jarvis on swords, samurai and working with De Niro

The star of Disney’s new visually stunning epic is at his sensual, bestial best as the first Englishman in Japan in the samurai classic. He takes us into a world of skulduggery, seafaring and death by cauldron

A conversation with Cosmo Jarvis is both soothingly calm and ceaselessly agitated. The stocky 34-year-old actor, dressed in checked shirt, black jeans and weather-beaten trainers, is affable and matey when we first meet. An hour later, there is a vigorous goodbye handshake, a mumbled “legend, legend”, and a wish for my “safe onward journey” as though he is a flight attendant and I’m a holidaymaker. To himself, however, he is less kind. He huffs and puffs when he can’t find the right word, and clasps his head in his hands while he hunts for an honest answer. Our meeting is punctuated by silences, though they are of the ruminative rather than the awkward sort. “I’m talking shit,” he says after one circuitous reply. “This is impossible!” he exclaims after another. The impression is of a man shouldering a heavy burden.

It is about to get heavier now that he is playing the lead in Shōgun, a spectacular 10-part period adventure adapted from James Clavell’s 1975 blockbuster novel set in feudal Japan, and previously filmed for TV with Richard Chamberlain in 1980. The series combines political skulduggery, plush sets and costumes, and a smattering of Game of Thrones-style violence; the first few episodes alone deliver several decapitations and the sight of one unfortunate soul being boiled alive in a cauldron. As for Jarvis, his brooding, bestial vibe couldn’t be any more different from Chamberlain’s matinee-idol slickness. He plays John Blackthorne, loosely based on Captain William Adams, who became in 1600 the first English person to set foot in Japan. When Blackthorne’s beleaguered ship drifts into a Japanese harbour where his ailing crew are taken hostage, he finds himself first used as a pawn in the local power struggles, before being appointed a samurai complete with his own army – just in time for the kind of spectacular combat sequences that might have left Kurosawa agog.