Shibasaki Kou will be starring in the TV Asahi drama SP "Koori no Wadachi" (The Ice Rut) which will be broadcast as the its Osaka affiliate ABC's 65th anniversary drama SP on 5 November at 9pm. The drama SP which was written specially by Naoki Award-winner Sakuragi Shino, features Shibasaki as a newbie police detective Daimon Mayu whose only family is her father who is about to die and doesn't know her mother's face nor name. In the snowy winter at Kushiro City in Hokkaido, she investigates a series of murder cases with her senior played by Sawamura Ikki. During the process, Mayu also meets an elderly lady (Miyamoto Nobuko) at the skating rink she frequents and a female president of a seafood processing company. The cast and crew spent a total of 20 days in February this year at Kushiro where the temperatures were below freezing point. In order to play her role convincingly and experience the loneliness which Mayu feels, Shibasaki went to the extent of not bringing her manager along for the filming. This was also the longest time she had spent in a single location for filming to date and she found that it was unusually stimulating since she could keep to a routine of waking up, doing stretches and going for filming every day while at Kushiro. Sawamura also echoed her view that the continuous filming allowed them to concentrate fully but the bitter cold made him feel like his ears were about to fall off after walking for just 10 minutes in the middle of the day when the temperature was below freezing.
