SHE may not be the star of the movie, but Nana Katase stole the limelight with her sexy long legs.
In Death Note 2: The Last Name, she plays a righteous broadcast journalist who takes over a death notebook and starts to kill criminals by scribbling their names in the notebook.
But the one scene that got everyone talking shows her sprawled on a sofa, flaunting those slender legs, all the while writing in that creepy notebook.
Undoubtedly, those killer legs must be Nana's best asset.
Standing at 1.72m, the 25-year-old beauty came to fame in 1999 as a swimsuit model, according to China Times. She modeled for the popular fashion magazine JJ, before crossing over to TV dramas (Shotgun Wedding, Last Christmas) and music.
Death Note 2, which opens here on Thursday, marks her first leap to the big screen.
Nana, who is always smiling, reportedly found it hard to put on a poker face to play her character Kiyomi.
Comparing herself to her alter ego, she wrote in an e-mail interview with The New Paper: 'Our similarity is that we both have a strong sense of justice, but we are different in that even though I have my beliefs, I would not kill anyone based on them.'
What would she do if she finds a death notebook in real life?
'I would hide it away,' she wrote.
But in the movie, her character gets high on killing criminals whom she thinks deserve to die anyway.
Little does she realise that she is only a pawn in a battle of wits between the original death notebook holder Light (Tatsuya Fujiwara) and his biggest foe, special agent L (Kenichi Matsuyama).
Apparently, Nana was so excited about the movie that she spoke about playing the female version of Light so that it would be a battle of the sexes instead.
She also would have liked to play the character of Misa (Erika Toda), a petite TV star who is so besotted with Light that she gives him her own death notebook.
On second thoughts, Nana joked: 'But my image does not quite gel with Misa's. I'll become the giant version of Misa instead!'
Incidentally, showbiz was never her dream to begin with.
Born to a professional volleyball player father and softball player mother, she grew up with the mentality that 'whether I could excel in my studies or not, I was to go into sports'.
'I was practically being raised by a sports team,' added Nana.
Not surprisingly, she loves outdoor sports and watching ball games in her free time.
So, must her dream guy be a sportsman too?
Not quite. She prefers someone who is 'kind and always smiling', she said.