CARY-HIROYUKI TAGAWA

When you start working on a series, it's almost too much work. It's like a movie a week.

Hollywood was a detour, although my mother was an aristocrat from Tokyo who ran away to join the theatre, so acting is in my genes.

I really believe that breath, in and of itself... can become the ultimate self-healing tool.

I originally started off as a healer before I came to Hollywood.

It's not whether you fall or make a mistake, it's what you do when you fall. And I say you stand up. You keep standing up. It's not how many times you fall, it's how many times you stand up.

My look is 'Poly'n'Asian' - part Polynesian native, part Asian warrior.

I believe the body can take care of itself. It's all about self-health. It's about depending on our breathing.

You release more toxins from the body through a deep exhale than you do from anything else.

The Hawaiian language needs to be studied globally as a language of life.

Hollywood is my day job.

The one thing that about me, being a healer, I just have a different kind of relationship with people. So I am defiantly a different type of celebrity.

Nature is a big part of my weekend. Whenever possible, I take Friday and Monday off and spend four days outdoors. We should remind ourselves that there was something here before us, a force more powerful than us.

Playing Japanese characters and being in environments that are Japanese, like a character's apartment or whatever, if you have directors or art directors who just don't know what' s what with Japanese culture, then pretty soon something's just passed through. I've been through many times where I've pointed out the incorrectness of so much of what's been done to a set.

The power of Hollywood, as we know, is that it can create these images in people's minds, and they live with those images for their whole life.

Actors are always looking for ways to build a character.

There were times when I purposely didn't go to school because of Pearl Harbor Day, because certainly there was enough media about it every year to remind everybody. So when I heard they were going to make the movie, I thought, "Oh, no, please not another Pearl Harbor mention!"

My major intention for coming to Hollywood - besides the fact that I was just enamored with acting from a very young age - was that I was tired of seeing wimpy Asian actors.

Looking back at my career, if there's one word that most people use to describe me, it's intense.

Before I started studying martial arts, I had temper problems. I could definitely fly off the handle. Being raised in the south in 1956 definitely gave me some memories to latch onto for negative emotions.

Americans really don't understand the Japanese nature, but it's not an easy thing to understand.

I'm not a method actor, I don't write my character's history or all those kinds of things. I'm more about the 90 percent of the brain that is subconscious. I like to just pick certain pieces, let it soak in, and then let it kind of emerge out.

Bruce Lee was the first guy to bring film recognition of Asian men not being wimps, so it made me want to be as powerful as he was.

To suddenly be working with one of the top-10 directors in the world, plus the film was in China, I almost blurted out, "How much do I have to pay?" It was just like a dream come true. That was an amazing experience.

In fact, I think new media is going to make a big difference with injecting more people of color into Hollywood and non-Hollywood.

Native Americans say, "It's a good day to die," and samurai live their life to die honorably, so that kind of energy creates a certain mindset of reactiveness with control to a point. And after that, it's gone.