‘Shōgun’ Stars Anna Sawai and Cosmo Jarvis Share Why Episode 4’s Hot Springs Scene is The Show’s Steamiest Yet

Anna Sawai‘s Toda Mariko probably speaks for all of us when she tells John Blackthorne (Cosmo Jarvis) in Shōgun Episode 4 “The Eightfold Fence”: “I am happy to see you have changed your mind about bathing.”

It’s not just that the Elizabethan era navigator needed to get hip to hygiene. The Shōgun Episode 4 hot spring scene is the FX show’s hottest moment yet. (Yes, two people not even looking at each other, imagining date night in Shakespeare’s London is far sexier than whatever Yuka Kouri‘s courtesan Kiku has cooking!)

**Spoilers for Shōgun Episode 4 “The Eightfold Fence,” now streaming on Hulu**

When Mariko stumbles upon Blackthorne bathing in the Ajiro hot spring in Shōgun Episode 4 “The Eightfold Fence,” it inspires a moment of rare emotional vulnerability for the samurai lady. She not only begins to reveal the truth about her past to the Anjin, but the two share a dream of a night in Blackthorne’s homeland. He tells her that he would present her to Queen Elizabeth II before taking her to a play — I’m rooting for Shakespeare’s classic rom-com As You Like It since scholars believe it would have debuted around this time (and is less of a drag than his histories) — followed by a walk along the Thames. Mariko isn’t just charmed, she’s liberated.

The whole scene is gorgeous, sweet, and will have you ‘shipping Mariko and Blackthorne hardcore. The magic trick of it is that for the bulk of it, the two characters aren’t even looking at each other. They sit back-to-back, Blackthorne naked in the spring and Mariko fully clothed, while sharing this fantasy.

“I think that sometimes it’s a little bit more intimate when you’re not looking at the person,” Anna Sawai said during an interview at Winter 2024 TCA. “You’re just feeling the presence of the person and kind of dreaming about a world in which they’re not in. And so that’s where the romance, kind of, I think sparks.”

“It was very difficult because one would think that if the intention was that sort of attraction that you would be facing each other,” Cosmo Jarvis told Decider during another interview at Winter 2024 TCA. “But sometimes these choices are made and they’re out of your hands.”

Ironically it might have been Anna Sawai who made the choice to set the scene up like this. At least, she remembers first having playing the scene “a little sexual” in her initial audition, which almost cost her the part. That’s because in the original version of the scene, as in James Clavell’s 1975 novel, Mariko gets into the bath with Blackthorne.

“But then I was like, ‘Why is she going into the bath?’ That was my question,” Sawai told Decider. “I didn’t want to perpetuate the sexual image that people had of Japanese women.”

The actress discussed the scene with Shōgun showrunners Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo and “we decided that she didn’t have to go into the bath.”

Of course, Blackthorne still had to get into the bath, which was ironically not as comfortable for Shōgun star Cosmo Jarvis as you’d might imagine.

“The hot springs, the set that production design and the art department had built, used water that was really, really hot,” Jarvis said. “They needed it to be hot for the steam.”

“So it was quite difficult,” he said wincing and smiling.

The end result, however, is a triumph. It’s a scene that not only sweeps you away into the story of Blackthorne and Mariko, but lets them escape their reality together as well.

“For Blackthorne, it became a case of losing himself in the subject matter of the conversation in his head because that was all there was,” Jarvis said.

“I think that with that scene, it’s the first time that she’s allowing herself to talk about [herself]. She’s letting him peep into her personal life. And in a way, I kind of played it so that it was a release for her rather than to tell a story to him,” Sawai said. “But he was allowing her to do that.”

“And yeah, that scene is really one of my favorite scenes.” (Ours, too.)