Taz Skylar on Playing a Dangerous Villain in ‘Cleaner’ and Working with a Legendary Director

Taz Skylar, best known for his role as Sanji in Netflix’s One Piece, takes on a completely different character in the new action thriller Cleaner. In the film, Skylar plays Noah, a dangerous member of an eco-terrorist group that crashes an energy company’s gala. Unlike the group’s leader Marcus (Clive Owen), who tries to keep things under control, Noah is unpredictable and willing to use violence.

For Skylar, playing Noah was both fun and cathartic. In an interview with ComicBook, he shared, “There’s so many elements of Noah’s rhetoric that are grounded in logic and that have a very profound point to make, that it felt like I suddenly had the license to say a lot of them and say them in a very visceral, very loud, very forward way.”

Skylar also spoke about how he approached his role differently in every scene. “I would play this game with myself during filming, where every time I came into a scene thinking I knew what I wanted to do, I would make it a point within myself to do something completely different,” he said. He credited director Martin Campbell for encouraging that creativity.

Speaking about working alongside Clive Owen, Skylar admitted he couldn’t match Owen’s commanding presence. “There’s no way that I can really compete with that. So my only way to come up against it is to do something completely different,” he explained.

Set in London, Cleaner follows a radical activist group that takes over an energy company’s gala, holding 300 people hostage to expose corruption. But when Noah takes things to an extreme level, willing to kill to make his message heard, it’s up to an ex-soldier-turned-window-cleaner (Daisy Ridley) to stop him and save those inside—including her younger brother.

For Skylar, getting to work with Casino Royale and GoldenEye director Martin Campbell was a dream come true. “His primary export is iconicism. Like the stuff that he does is just iconic,” he said. “And I grew up watching them… If once in my lifetime I can make a movie like the ones that I still watch because I watch them on repeat, I’ll die a happy man.”

Skylar praised Campbell’s passion and work ethic, saying, “He is relentless, uncompromising, and as an 80-year-old man, has more energy than all the 20- and 30-year-olds in the room combined.”

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