Ryuhei Matsuda is a Japanese film and television actor. Matsuda's best known film roles include the young and desirable samurai Sōzaburō Kanō in Taboo and the rock star Ren Honjo in Nana.
Matsuda was born on 9 May 1983 in Tokyo, to Yūsaku Matsuda, a Japanese actor of partial Korean ancestry, and Miyuki Matsuda (née Kumagai), a Japanese actress. He has two younger siblings, a younger brother, Shota Matsuda, who is also an actor, and a younger sister, Yuuki Matsuda, who is a singer, and one older half-sister by his father's first marriage. His father died from bladder cancer in 1989, when Ryuhei was six years old. He attended Horikoshi High School, a Japanese high school that caters to celebrity students, but did not graduate.At age 15, Matsuda was offered the role of the desirable young samurai Kanō Sōzaburō in Nagisa Ōshima's 1999 film Taboo. The role helped boost him from an entirely unknown actor to a film star, earning him a Japanese Academy award "Newcomer of the Year", as well as "Blue Ribbon", "Kinema Junpo", and "Yokohama Film Festival" Awards for the "Best New Actor".
Since appearing in Taboo, Matsuda has played a wide range of roles, from the high school student Kujo in the 2001 film Blue Spring to the rock star Ren Honjo in the 2005 film Nana. In February 2013, it was revealed that Matsuda would play the part of a Japanese gangster in the sequel to the 2012 Indonesian film The Raid, named Berandal.
In 2020 portrayed Ryūnosuke Akutagawa in the film A Stranger in Shanghai. It depicts Akutagawa's time in as a reporter in the city.
