SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers for the entire first season of “Sunny,” streaming now on Apple TV+.

As a Japanese actor, Hidetoshi Nishijima often gets offers to play morally gray characters like samurai and yakuza members who are defined by a particular profession and era. But then he was approached to play a roboticist whose mysterious disappearance puts his wife (and the intelligent robot friend he’s designed for her) at the center of a criminal conspiracy in “Sunny,” Apple TV+’s darkly comic sci-fi thriller that just wrapped its first season. Nishijima — who starred in “Drive My Car,” the 2021 Japanese film that was nominated for Best Picture and won the Academy Award for International Feature Film — relished the chance to play an ordinary man grappling with existential questions about what it means to be human.

"Of course his profession is a big part of this project, but the most important thing is that he's a normal guy and he falls in love with a woman, gets married and then starts his own family, and then he's faced with this unexpected thing," Nishijima tells Variety through a Japanese interpreter. "I think the most important part of this show is that it's about love and fear and the unknown, so this is basically a human story. That's the part that appealed to me."

Based on Colin O’Sullivan’s 2018 novel “The Dark Manual” and created for television by Katie Robbins (who is also behind a new Hulu miniseries starring “Grey’s Anatomy” star Ellen Pompeo), “Sunny” follows Suzie Sakamoto (Rashida Jones), an American expat living in Kyoto, Japan, whose world is turned upside down when her husband Masa (Nishijima) and their son Zen (Fares Belkheir) both disappear in a supposed plane crash. Following their disappearances, a grieving Suzie is given Sunny (voiced by Joanna Sotomura), one of a new class of domestic robots created by Masa’s electronics company ImaTech, whom she gradually comes to lean on for support — and uses to uncover what really happened to her family.