In addition to his extensive film work, he has appeared on television in Star Trek: The Next Generation - "Encounter at Farpoint" (1987), Thunder in Paradise (1995), Nash Bridges (1996), and Baywatch: Hawaiian Wedding (2003). He also provided the voice of Sin Tzu for the video game Batman: Rise of Sin Tzu. He is usually typecasted as a bad guy in movies like Mortal Kombat, Pearl Harbor, Memoirs of a Geisha, etc.

The son of an actress from Tokyo and an American father who served in the United States Army (stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, Fort Polk, Louisiana and Fort Hood, Texas), Tagawa was born in Tokyo and was raised in various cities. He began acting in high school in Southern California. He attended the University of Southern California, and was an exchange student in Japan.

His breakthrough as an actor came when he was cast as the Eunuch Chang in The Last Emperor (1987).

In 1989 he posed as an undercover agent of the Hong Kong Narcotics Board in the James Bond film License to Kill.

Many will remember him in the movie Mortal Kombat (1995) as the shape-shifting sorcerer Shang Tsung, and as the deadly pirate leader Kabai Singh in The Phantom (1996).

He lives in Hawaii with his wife and children.

Cary-Hiroyuki 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.