Julian Wilson is a fictional American singer-songwriter and dessert chef living in Tokyo.
Nathan C. Berg is a professor of economics at the University of Texas at Dallas and a musician, working as a movie actor in Japan, portraying Mr. Wilson.
How did an American academic wind up starring in a forthcoming feature film overseas?
Mr. Berg, 37, says he met with the producers of the Japanese film, Golden Miracle, during a stint as a visiting researcher at the University of Osaka last summer, to offer some of his songs to the project.
He got his break in a late-night, three-hour meeting with the Japanese producer and director. Mr. Berg fell asleep while they were deliberating on his music on their own, but he awoke to an unexpected offer: Would he like to star in the film?
“I was primarily interested in performing and writing songs,” he wrote in an e-mail interview from Japan. But one scene has Mr. Wilson performing before a crowd.
Mr. Berg described his character as “a singer-songwriter working in the Americana/acoustic-rock domain,” someone who listens to the Beatles, David Bowie, and the Pixies.
“Now I am trying to memorize my lines though and am starting to sweat a bit,” Mr. Berg confessed.
He initially thought Mr. Wilson was a minor character. “When I finally got the script at the beginning of September, I found that Julian appears in way more than half the scenes,” he wrote.
Mr. Berg front-loaded his teaching for a semester in Dallas, then took a month off to film in Japan. Since arriving, in mid-October, he’s had language coaching (80 percent of the lines are in Japanese), culinary training (his character bakes at a high-end cake shop), and has filmed the climactic scene, in which he performs one of his original songs to a large audience of screaming fans in Yokohama Park.
That scene has been the best perk so far, says Mr. Berg, who told Yoshihiro Fukagawa, the director, that he’d made a “genuine connection” with the adoring members of the audience.
Mr. Fukagawa’s response: “Yeah, I hired them. They are all young actors being paid to like your music.”
Golden Miracle is to be released in Japan in fall 2010.