Shin Koyamada / Biography

Shin Koyamada's love of American and Hong Kong action movies began as a small boy at his father's side while in elementary school. Born March 10, 1982, in Okayama, Japan, his love has grown and matured into the dream of action stardom. Despite the disapproval from family and friends going to USA for his acting career in junior high school, he was determined to see this dream and turned all his energy to intensive physical training in many different kinds of sports and was also a captain in a competition level gymnastic team. At the age of 16, he began to study his first martial arts, Karate competing in international level Karate tournaments, within two years of training, had earned a black belt skipped all the way from a white belt, becoming qualified to teach as a master of Karate.At the age of 18, he has arrived to Hollywood alone, not knowing anyone, no place to stay, no knowledge of western culture and no sense of direction of North or South for his acting career. In addition to his intensive study of the language and acting at college in Los Angeles, he has started training in Kung Fu for 5 hours a day, almost 7 days a week and after his five months of non-stopping training he has competed in six US National Martial Arts Tournaments in Kung Fu over five months and winning first place in all but one and that was a second.By at age 19 he had choreographed and performed martial arts forms and stage combat for a production of Shakespeare's Coriolanus at the Knightsbridge Theater and was featured on an episode of the children's action show "Power Rangers Wild Force" (2002) and his first movie work on a short film called A Ninja Pays Half My Rent (2003). Without an agent or a manager, he followed the path of those who had inspired him, icons like Bruce Lee and Asian action stars such as Jackie Chan and Jet Li.Submitting himself for various projects via an Internet casting site, and landed the most of a powerful debut feature film role in The Last Samurai (2003), co-starring opposite with Tom Cruise and Director/Producer by Edward Zwick in the Warner Brothers epic as Nobutada, a fierce archer, double swordsman, a young Samurai and a friend to Tom Cruise's Cpt. While filming The Last Samurai in Japan, USA, and New Zealand, he added Kyudo (Japanese Archery) and horseback riding to his repertoire. He left college one semester short of graduating to film on The Last Samurai (2003) and a Drama feature film Constellation (2005) as a leading role director by Jordan Walker-Pearlman. In 2006, he launched his first starring role in the Disney movie Wendy Wu: Homecoming Warrior (2006) (TV).