It’s not a great time to have Ansel Elgort as your leading man. That said, here's Tokyo Vice!
As Elgort continues to be attached to a series of sexual assault allegations, which have marred his West Side Story press push, HBO Max unveiled the first trailer for action-thriller series Tokyo Vice, set to premiere this April. The show stars Elgort, fresh from that controversial West Side Story experience, as The Daily Beast’s own contributor Jake Adelstein, a writer who uncovers perilous information about the Japanese mafia.
West Side Story may have slashed Elgort from a good portion of their promotional material—based on the ads alone, you might have thought the Romeo and Juliet-inspired story had entirely eschewed its Romeo—but Tokyo Vice does nothing of the sort. The actor takes front and center stage (it’d be hard for him not to, as the entire show revolves around pretty much just his character), cracking the case of the seedy underbelly of Tokyo.
Why does Jake crave the crime beat of journalism in Tokyo? “Giving up and going home is not an option. You know what I mean?” he says in the trailer. He continues, now in Japanese: “I want to know the real Tokyo, what’s beneath the surface.”
But what’s lurking underground is never safe, as Jake soon makes a whole slew of foes just in this first trailer. But that’s what makes a “good reporter,” he argues, is “lots of enemies.” With a darker viewing of a normally neon-soaked image of the city, Tokyo Vice offers up a gritty true crime story with a bit of dramatic action even added into the mix.
You can read about the allegations against Elgort here. After Tokyo Vice, which was announced prior to the scandal, Elgort has no projects officially lined up on his acting roster. All of his other gigs—including a JFK war film, a crime thriller with Jake Gyllenhaal, and a musical film about Hans Christian Andersen—are just in development.
Apart from Elgort, Tokyo Vice stars Ken Watanabe, Rachel Keller, Ella Rumpf, Shun Sugata, and Kosuke Toyohara. The 10-episode series is created and written by J.T. Rogers, based on Adelstein’s 2009 memoir Tokyo Vice: An American Report on the Police Beat in Japan. Adelstein serves as executive producer alongside Elgort and Watanabe.
Tokyo Vice will premiere its first three episodes to HBO Max on April 7, with new episodes debuting every Thursday after that.
