Maui couple soaks in glitzy Hollywood week and Emmy wins for creating FX series Shōgun

Just 10 days after their glitzy, record-setting night at the 76th Primetime Emmy Awards in Los Angeles, married couple Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks were happy to be back home in Ha‘ikū with their young kids to let it all sink in.

“I want to have a conch shell and I want to blow into it,” Kondo said Tuesday.

What a journey it has been for Kondo and Marks, who started the historical fiction series in 2018. Along the way there have been interruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, work stoppages due to the 2023 Hollywood strikes of both writers and actors, plenty of arguments — and, on a happier note, the birth of their two kids.

They never imagined that on Sept. 15, they would be standing on the big stage of the Peacock Theatre, filled with a galaxy worth of stars looking at them, while they accepted Emmys for Outstanding Drama Series as executive producers of Shōgun.

It capped off an incredible week in which the series set in Japan in the year 1600 at the dawn of a century-defining civil war, and mostly spoken in Japanese with subtitles, captured a record 18 Emmys in one year after being nominated for an incredible 25.

“I don’t think any of us would have guessed six years ago that we would have had a week like last week,” Marks said. “We just didn’t think this was that kind of show. We were just having fun together, and we all loved the book. And wanted to sort of tell a modern version of it.”

The drama is based on a 1975 novel by James Clavell, which was previously adapted into a 1980 miniseries with Richard Chamberlain. The 2024 version of Shōgun has an ensemble cast that includes Hiroyuki Sanada, Cosmo Jarvis, Anna Sawai, Tadanobu Asano, Takehiro Hira, Tommy Bastow and Fumi Nikaido.

After the first few episodes, the series began receiving widespread critical acclaim, especially for the writing, directing, visuals, production, performances and faithfulness to the source material, according to a story in Deadline Hollywood.

The series follows Lord Yoshii Toranaga, who is fighting for his life as his enemies on the Council of Regents unite against him when a mysterious European ship is found marooned in a nearby fishing village.

The Emmy week started with the creative arts Emmys, where Kondo and Marks sat next to Noah Hawley, the writer and creator of the “Fargo” series. In the same row sat comediens Kristen Wiig and Maya Rudolph of Saturday Night Live and movie fame.

“If I were to die and come back as someone else, there are three: the first one would be Julie Andrews, the second one might be Eleanor Roosevelt and then the third one would be Kristen Wiig – I love her,” Kondo said.

On the night of the Primetime Emmys, the couple sat a few rows back from actress Brie Larson, who starred in “Kong: Skull Island” and “Captain Marvel.”

“It was very, very unnerving,” Kondo said. “We were not rubbing shoulders, but we brushed past Jodie Foster. One of the more unnerving moments that night was when we walked on stage and I took a deep breath, faced the audience and the first person my eyes go to was Meryl Streep. And I think, ‘Thank goodness I’m not speaking right now.’ It was really fun.”

The week also was full of parties, “which sounds really fun, but by night three or four it’s really exhausting because we’re also working during the day,” Kondo said.

The party circuit requires several wardrobe changes, which is not only time-consuming, but also challenging and stressful to find different outfits.

“We had a stylist who helped supplement our own wardrobe, but my favorite outfit was at the Vanity Fair party,” Kondo said. “I had gone to a vintage trunk show in L.A. that morning. … You would not even have recognized Justin and I that night. It was very Vanity Fair.”

Kondo said wardrobe, hair and makeup for the week took half the time.

“You start getting ready at 2 o’clock, you get picked up at 5 o’clock and then you’re out all night to, I don’t know, midnight,” she said. “Then you have to get up for work the next morning and then you do it all over again.”

For Kondo, a 1999 Maui High School graduate, Shōgun is a special project, extremely close to her heart. Her father, Gary, is Japanese and her mother, Eleanor, is Caucasian, or as she calls her, a “local haole.”

As the project developed and Kondo and Marks were able to show some of the early work on the series to her parents, it helped them realize just what their daughter and her husband were up to.

“It’s probably been a little bit of a mystery to them for a while as to what exactly we do,” Kondo said. “But when we started to show them early cuts, I think they started to say, ‘Oh, this is big.’ And yeah, it’s been really fun.”

Her father has a special routine for watching the show.

“He would call me five minutes before the show would drop. And he would say, ‘I’m sitting here. I have five minutes more to wait until the next episode,’” Kondo said. “And then he would just want to sit in silence until it dropped. So, I think he’s been incredibly excited in his own way.”

The Shōgun series has allowed Kondo to reconnect with the Japanese side of her family in a new way. 

“They keep showing me old photos,” she said. “My Japanese side of the family came over like everybody else back in the day, to work the cane fields. My grandmother was born in a plantation camp in Sprecklesville — very, very proud, hardworking people. It’s so nice to get to kind of highlight that side of my life.”

The challenges of being married and working together certainly surfaced as they developed the series. Arguments are part of the process for the seven writers on the show — and this was the first joint project that Marks and Kondo have worked on.

Kondo’s background is in short-story writing and Marks is more adept at screenwriting.

“Basically, this entire project kind of hinges on the fights between Justin and me, or at least it started with that,” Kondo said Wednesday. “I think a lot of the tension comes from my having to learn how to shift from short-story writing to screenwriting. The process of getting the subtitling right, our entire post-production team had to listen to marital spats, day in and day out, as we debated over an ellipses here or a comma there.”

But she said tension is important for telling stories.

“It’s basically the tension in the writers’ room, the tension between Justin and me, the tension between us and the studio,” she said. “It’s because you’re all trying to tangle out the very best way of telling the story. You need everybody’s input and you need everybody’s passion if you’re going to arrive at the best option.”

Kondo, who grew up in Pukalani and attended Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego and the James Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin, and Marks, who was born in New York and attended Columbia University in the Big Apple, met in 2006 in Los Angeles.

At The Short Stop bar in Echo Park, which Kondo calls an “everlasting dive bar,” they were introduced to each other by accomplished director Susanna Fogel. “Funny, we were just kids then,” Kondo said.

They got married in 2010 and in 2022 moved to Maui, where they do much of their work remotely.

It’s where they treasure raising their kids Cora, who will celebrate her 5th birthday on Sunday, and 3-year-old Rosemary, with their maternal grandparents close by in Wailuku.

Marks recently bought a tractor, which gives him more reason to spend time in the backyard.

“I love that my upbringing was really in New England when it comes to my summers and outdoors,” Marks said. “And it was important to me to just have girls who were raised in the outdoors and who know how to handle nature and know how to really not be afraid of geckos and insects and everything else.”

The pandemic opened their world to Zoom meetings and along with it Marks said it brought a new thought process for both of them — the world became much more accessible as they worked through the work of getting Shōgun off the ground. Production took place in Vancouver, B.C., but they were able to tap authentic Japanese ideas on their computer screens. 

“It’s incredibly surreal because the process is so long and arduous and chaotic,” Kondo said. “You don’t do this work for the awards, because it’s so hard.”

While Kondo and Marks, both writers who love what they do, find gratification in the work itself, Kondo said: “This was on a whole other scale, and it was a whole other beast. And so, yeah, it felt very gratifying.”

Marks interjected that a lot of the work on the series they did from Maui: “This is where we write. And live. It feels kind of like an abstraction. Like there’s two bodies that we exist (in), or inhabit. One is here and one is there. 

“The bodies there wear tuxedos and nice dresses. And then here is where our closet is filled with our real life.”

Kondo and Marks also were nominated for Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series for episodes they wrote of “Shōgun” — Kondo for two, Marks for one.

Marks, who has also written for “The Jungle Book” and “Top Gun: Maverick” movies, said the Emmy experience caught all of the writers of Shōgun by surprise. The writers now are gearing to do it again with the series picked up for a second season.

Kondo and Marks also were recently named as this year’s Career Achievement Award honorees at the Hawaiʻi International Film Festival 44, which will be held across the state in October and November, including Oct. 19-20 on Maui.

They will be on Oʻahu on Oct. 11 at Consolidated Theaters Kahala for “Shogun: An Evening with Showrunners Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo.”

Kondo recently wrote a letter of recommendation for a Baldwin High School student applying to college and it made her reflect on her own experience at Maui High, where she was a standout point guard for the Sabers basketball team.

“I wouldn’t be here without my Maui upbringing,” she said. “I think that Maui gave me not only a story to tell, but a voice through which to tell it. I mean, it’s all of the textures and the smells and everything sensory from my Maui childhood. I’ve written about it and my background’s in fiction writing. … I mean, it is a very, very, very special place.”

Kondo, who said she is currently working on a script for a project set on Maui in the 1990s, said she has a simple message for kids growing up here.

“Aim as high as you can, as high as you can imagine you can go, because even if you don’t hit that mark, you’re gonna hit something,” Kondo said. “Know what a privilege it is to come from here, be proud of that fact, go into the world and to share some of it. Bring the world into your experience of being from here and then come back home and share how far you went with all of us.”

Marks added that the pair thinks about producing on Maui.

“Tourism is such a temptation for an economy, right? But what is another export that Maui has that no one else can match? The export is photographs of this place. There’s truly no other place in the world that you can imitate it,” he said. “And, man, if we could a way to harness that for jobs here, that would be amazing.”