Vogue cover: Shogun star calls Australia home

Anna Sawai has won an Emmy, a Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild trophy for her breakthrough role in Shogun – and returned to her Gold Coast home each time.

Vogue Australia cover reveal for March 2025 featuring Shogun star Anna Sawai. Picture: Taika Waititi for Vogue Australia

Few have had a year quite like Anna Sawai.

The Japanese actor was a relative newcomer to Hollywood when the acclaimed Disney+ miniseries Shogun launched her into the heady world of stardom, ­winning her a brace of awards, ­including an Emmy, a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild trophy.

And after each victory, Sawai told Vogue Australia’s March issue, she boarded a 14-hour flight to Australia, where she has been quietly based for the past six months.

“Coming back to this place, it felt so warm and like I could just be myself,” Sawai said of her apartment on the Gold Coast, where she has been living while making the second season of her television show, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters.

“I go out in my sweats and no makeup and no one cares about me,” she added. “In Australia, no one has recognised me, and I love it. Because then I get to just enjoy my normal life.”

Vogue Australia’s March issue cover was shot in a studio in Broadbeach on the Gold Coast, styled by editor-in-chief Christine Centenera and photographed by the filmmaker Taika Waititi.

Shogun star Anna Sawai. Picture: Taika Waititi for Vogue Australia

Sawai and Waititi share history; the actor was actually born in New Zealand and Waititi jokingly told the magazine he “claimed her as a Kiwi” after her many award wins. The pair have known each other since 2019, long before Shogun was garlanded as the television event of the year, when Waititi eyed her for a role in his long-gestating adaptation of the cult manga, Akira.

“Even just to get to take photos of her was one step closer to achieving my dream” of working with her, Waititi said. “I’ll work with her on anything.”

Vogue Australia cover reveal for March 2025 featuring Shogun star Anna Sawai. Picture: Taika Waititi for Vogue Australia

He’s not alone. Rumours are swirling that Sawai will star as Yoko Ono in Sam Mendes’s ­quartet of Beatles films, alongside Harris Dickinson as John Lennon, Paul Mescal as Paul McCartney, Barry Keoghan as Ringo Starr and Joseph Quinn as George Harrison.

Still unconfirmed at the time Vogue Australia went to print, Sawai said she has been presented with several pinch-me opportunities.

“I’ve been able to have meetings or read for some amazing directors,” she said.

“But I feel like those things I’m not really allowed to say. But people everyone would know.”

One thing is clear; Sawai is set for greatness. Post breakthrough moment, her plan is to seek out roles that will carry the same emotional and cultural weight as her turn in Shogun.

“I’m so much more careful with the roles that I audition for, or the roles that I will take on. I know that if I play a character that doesn’t have that much depth, that’s what I’m sending to the world. That Japanese women – because I am a Japanese woman – don’t have much depth,” she told Vogue Australia. “I don’t wanna play the stereotype.”

Vogue Australia’s March issue will go on sale on Monday