Often cast as villains, he is known for his film roles in: The Last Emperor (1987), the James Bond film Licence to Kill (1989), Showdown in Little Tokyo (1991), American Me (1992), Rising Sun (1993), Mortal Kombat (1995), The Phantom (1996), Snow Falling on Cedars (1999), Pearl Harbor (2001), Planet of the Apes (also 2001), Memoirs of a Geisha (2005), Tekken (2009), 47 Ronin (2013), Tekken 2: Kazuya's Revenge (2014), and Kubo and the Two Strings (2017).

In 1991, he starred alongside Dolph Lundgren and Brandon Lee in the action film Showdown in Little Tokyo, where he played the role of yakuza boss Yoshida.

He also starred alongside James Hong, Mako Iwamatsu and Jeff Speakman in the same year in the film The Perfect Weapon, where he played Kai, an assistant to the Korean mafia families.

In 1993, he starred as the wayward scion of a Japanese industrialist in Rising Sun, where Sean Connery, Wesley Snipes, and Harvey Keitel played detectives holding various viewpoints about the murder of a young woman that Tagawa's character was being framed for.

Tagawa is among the actors, producers and directors interviewed in the documentary The Slanted Screen (2006), directed by Jeff Adachi, about the representation of Asian and Asian-American men in Hollywood.

[6] In 2015, Tagawa was cast as one of the lead characters, Nobusuke Tagomi, the Trade Minister of the Pacific States of America in Amazon's The Man in the High Castle based on Philip K. Dick's novel of the same name.