From Yuji Itadori in Jujutsu Kaisen to Marco Diaz in Star vs. the Forces of Evil, voice actor Adam McArthur might be one of the only people in the business who can fight as well as the characters he voices. McArthur’s career has been a storied and eventful one.
Aside from Yuji and Marco, you may recognize him as Reno Ichikawa in Kaiju No. 8, Chifuyu Matsuno in Tokyo Revengers, or Jouno Saigiku in Bungo Stray Dogs. Luckily, we at Anime Corner had the opportunity to sit down with him over the holidays and discuss how he became a voice actor, what he brings to the table when voicing different characters, and the kind of attitude he holds as a major figure in the industry.
Becoming a Voice Actor
To start, it made sense to get an understanding of how McArthur got into voice acting and acting writ large. I started our conversation by asking him how he came to work as a voice actor and what first got him interested in voice acting for anime specifically. He explained he’d wanted to be a voice actor for much of his life and even ended up working on one of the anime that first inspired him to explore the genre.
“Voice acting is one of those things that I wanted to do since I was a kid. My earliest memories were wanting to be a voice actor — or wanting to do cartoons I guess you could say; I don’t think I knew what a voice actor was. I think I just wanted to do voices for cartoons. When I was 16, I got put in my first acting class and shortly after that was my first paid professional voiceover job. And once I realized I could make money doing what I was getting in trouble for in school I thought ‘I’d like to do more of that.’ And then anime specifically came much much later into my career. I had already been working in VO [voice over] for two decades basically, but in 2019 the Disney show that I was on, Star vs. The Forces of Evil, was ending and I was watching My Hero Academia. And I was like ‘Man, these guys sound like they’re having a lot of fun. I wonder why I’ve never done anime or why I don’t get auditions for anime’ and reached out to my agent. Shortly after that I had my first audition for an anime project and I didn’t get anything at that moment — it was for My Hero Academia. I did end up working on that down the road. My second audition ever for anime was Jujutsu Kaisen and obviously, we know how that went (laughs).”
He elaborated on what he meant by getting in trouble at school; McArthur’s ability to display charm and humor for other people wasn’t always as well received in a classroom as it is on the screen.
“I was the kid always talking in class and making his classmates laugh and even my teachers laugh. For the most part, my teachers really liked me. But you know, there were times where it’s like, ‘All right you’re talking too much. You gotta go take a little time out.’ All my progress reports and report cards in elementary school always said like ‘loves to talk, really good socially, might need to focus more,’ you know, things like that.”
McArthur is unique in that he has experience in traditional / live-action acting and voice acting. He explained some of the similarities and differences between the different mediums and what they demand of an actor.
“From an acting standpoint, all of it is fairly similar. Obviously, the anime genre has things that you don’t find in other Western cartoons, for example, you have the classic anime screams and yells, or little anime noises like the noises you hear when an anime character notices something. All of those you don’t really hear that too often in other things, so there’s like stuff like that. That’s genre-specific. Where it differs mostly is actually from the technical standpoint. When I was on Star vs the Forces of Evil or when I’ve done other prelay shows — meaning the first step in production is me recording and then that gets sent off to be animated — you have a lot more freedom. I’m not matching a picture that’s already been made. But with anime, I am matching a picture. So that’s where the difference is and it is totally a skill to be able to dub and watch something in points and then fill everything in with perfect timing as you’re watching it and as you’re acting. So yeah, that’s where anime is a little bit different than other genres”
In comparing his various roles and the different kinds of characters he’s voiced in anime specifically, McArthur explained that he doesn’t think of roles solely in terms of what’s easiest to get into or hardest to get into, instead focusing on his effort and the nature of the performance he’s able to deliver each time he gets in front of a microphone.
“I think I’ve been doing this long enough that I don’t actually really think of it in terms of what’s easy or hard. I think I just try and do my best. At this point, it’s not that the pressure is not there, I think I just — I’ve always been my own biggest critic when it comes to anything; I’m the hardest on myself. I used to compete heavily in martial arts, and I was always the one on my case the most when I wouldn’t win or something like that and it’s kind of the same thing with my acting career. Although, as I’m getting older, I just sort of feel like everyone’s always just doing their best, and if we all always feel hints of imposter syndrome and things like that, then that means it’s just part of the normal human experience. And if that’s the case and we’re all kind of experiencing that, then we don’t really need to worry about it too much.
“When Kaiju [No. 8] came along it was after Season 2 of JJK [Jujutsu Kaisen]. And after Season 2 of JJK — the trauma that happened to Yuji, all the hard stuff that I had to go through in the sessions, and what I feel like I brought to make it feel real during that time at the end of Season 2, I was very much in need of a break right from JJK. […] And then Kaiju came along. Reno Ichikawa is another good boy. He’s got good intentions and he’s a ride-or-die for Kafka and I love that. I keep getting to play these good boys. But he’s a totally different character. He’s not as goofy as Yuji, but he still has these strong convictions and things like that. So for me, I’m just having a good time finding out how I can relate to these characters to try and make them as real as possible for people. I’m not interested in doing ‘anime reads’ or like sounding like I’m on an anime. I just want to make these characters feel as real and cool as possible for the people watching.”
A Season of Strength and Suffering in Jujutsu Kaisen
Anyone following the Jujutsu Kaisen anime knows that, compared to Season 1, Season 2 is filled with veritable gut punches of emotion that hit both the characters within the story and fans alike. The person at the center of a lot of the emotional twists in the series is protagonist Yuji Itadori, whose usual upbeat, cheerful demeanor forms a tragic juxtaposition with the level of suffering and destruction in the series’ second season.
McArthur was the key enhancer of those emotional scenes as they were adapted from the printed page to anime. I wanted to know how he approached these emotional moments and what his process was for preserving some elements of them and enhancing others.
“For me in those moments, what I have to do is I have to think about boiling down what’s being felt in those moments to as simple a form as possible. Obviously, I’ve never leveled a portion of Tokyo so I can’t relate in that way. It’s not like I’ve ever woken up and have done some crazy thing without knowing it so it’s not relatable in that way. But that first scene back in Season 2 when he gets his body back from Sukuna and he’s looking at what Sukuna did — it’s like alright, what is he feeling in those moments? Well, he’s feeling an immense amount of guilt because he feels like everything that has happened leading up to that moment is his fault. I’m like, ‘Okay. Well, I can relate to guilt.’ We’ve all felt guilty for something and so my process at that point is relating it to something that I have felt guilty about and then thinking about that and just connecting those dots. What would it have been like if the guilt was worse? Just sort of going through those steps, those motions to get back in touch with those feelings.
“Essentially, what your job is as an actor is to just live a full life. Just live, go out, and live life. Do things that aren’t acting-related and experience emotions and experience feelings and then be able to recall those emotions and feelings once you need them when you’re actually acting. And so that’s basically what I did. So those last eight episodes of Season 2 where Yuji is just getting beaten down over and over and he feels like nothing he can do Is gonna make a difference. He’s losing his friends — these are all very relatable things. So it’s basically just living in the headspace of what it feels like to lose people you love, to maybe feel like it’s your fault and all that stuff. Just drawing on all that is my process.”
I was curious whether those scenes were the most memorable ones or if others stood out as well.
“I do feel like I was doing some really good work in those moments […] when I’m in the booth recording, not feeling like I’m faking any emotions so that all of those things you’re hearing come from really real places for me. And afterward, crying on the way home in the car, where it’s just this release of emotions — that’s kind of my gauge for was it real or not. There was a take in the scene where he’s on the ground in the fetal position and Todo enters […] and our first like take of it I Told the director ‘We can’t use that. I’m totally faking it. I’m aiming for a target as opposed to just experiencing those emotions.’ We did it again and I was like ‘I just need a few minutes to get in this headspace’ and thankfully I got there. Those scenes were pretty memorable I would say just due to the heaviness, but then there were some really sweet tender moments in Season 2 also. The episode where Yuji sees Ozawa again, that stuff was really sweet. The Yuji Choso fight, I don’t know if this has anything to do with my performance, but I just love that episode. I thought the Yuji Choso fight was one of the best in the season. I’m a big martial arts guy so all the shoutouts and homages to other martial arts moves in that episode specifically was so cool. So yeah, probably that and then all the emotional stuff.”
While McArthur can be a physical actor, he indicated that he never goes so far as doing martial arts while recording, though he does sometimes make an effort to move a bit during scenes to match Yuji’s cadence. One way he did go above and beyond what a voice actor normally might is in lending his voice for Megan Thee Stallion’s song “Otaku Hot Girl.” I asked him how he felt about that collab and whether he sees a future for more anime and music collabs going forward.
“I think it’s a testament to the explosion of anime […]. Anime wasn’t seen as this amazing thing that everyone kind of knew until much more recently. Covid is probably a big reason why it started to explode because we were all home looking for more stuff to watch and then that paired with TikTok was just sort of a perfect storm of timing. But I think that there is a lot more room for things to grow and I think we’re gonna be seeing a lot of collabs. I think anything where people realize there’s money there It’s gonna bring out some crazy stuff. You know what I mean? So I know that there’s Universal Studios is doing a collab with JJK soon […] it’s gonna be cool that the Western audiences are gonna start getting that. And I think rap collabs definitely. There’s a ton of fans of anime. I think more voices will be sampled, more things will be pulled from shows and licensed and all that stuff.”
Looking forward to the Jujutsu Kaisen Culling Game arc, I asked McArthur whether there were any specific scenes or kinds of scenes he was looking forward to (slight spoilers in the answer for a newly introduced character).
McArthur’s Answer
Oh definitely. For anyone listening to this. This is manga spoiler-y. Yeah, I’m gonna keep it a little vague, but there’s a character coming in called Higuruma. I’m very excited for the Yuji Higuruma fight Obviously we see Yuta say that he’s gonna kill Yuji Itadori, so there’s gonna be some action between those two that I’m super excited about. And then we’re gonna meet a lot of new characters in Season 3 and I’m excited. So there are a few of them I’m looking forward to meeting.
McArthur also explained that, especially for shows like Jujutsu Kaisen, he likes to have read ahead of where the anime is in the source material. This lets him add a bit extra to his performance and connect scenes to future revelations he otherwise wouldn’t be aware of.
“For me personally, I like to know that a moment is coming. That way if it’s related to something way down the road. I can try and add a little bit of something extra so that when we get to that moment down the road you know that we were pointing there and someone can look back at it and be like, ‘That’s why you said it like that.’ I think that elevates performance in this genre and in this medium”
On My Hero Academia and Heroes Writ Large
McArthur voices Koku Hanabata (also known as Trumpet) in My Hero Academia, though he’s noted in past interviews that he would’ve liked to play a hero. I asked him whether he was more drawn to heroes in general or if My Hero Academia‘s heroes were special to him.
“That’s a good question. I would say both. I mean, I love the heroes in My Hero. I love that. There are so many different ones I love. But I will say just in general I think superheroes have always just been so cool to me. I used to have this thing when I was little — this little headcanon when I was a little kid that we were all born with superpowers. But you had to say some word and it would unlock your superpowers. So I used to go around making up words and trying to figure out what my secret word was to unlock whatever superpower it was that was hidden. I’ve always been a fan of and resonated with superheroes. I think that there would be something cool to playing a villain in a world like Arcane or something like that. The character that I got cast as in My Hero Academia, Trumpet, was around in Season 5. He wasn’t a hero, but he didn’t really do that much bad stuff either. [ . . . ] I would say for the most part I lean towards hero characters.”
With the announcement of My Hero Academia: Vigilantes, I also wanted to know if there was anyone McArthur would want to play in that series.
“Oh, Koichi would be awesome. Koichi would be awesome, to be honest. He’s who I would cast myself as. I mean he kind of has a little bit of that Yuji sort of vibe I think, so that would be fun. We’ll see; we’ll do interview part two when that happens.”
When asked if there were any other styles of characters besides the “good boy” characters that he’d like people to recognize him for, McArthur explained he cares much more about performing the role to the best of his ability.
“I don’t feel like I care a lot these days about ‘Oh, I hope someone knows me as this or I hope someone knows me as that.’ I more so just want to do a good job with whatever has been handed to me and gifted to me and I want to make sure that fans know that it’s in good hands, and I want us all to enjoy it together. [ . . . ] I Think I’m just in a space where I’m just so thankful for what I’ve got these days. It’s not that I’m not hungry and not striving to do more but I’m also just very happy and content with what I’ve got going”
To close, I asked McArthur more of a fun question: if he had to get isekai’d into the world of any of his characters and had to live as them, who would he live as?
“All right definitely not Yuji because everyone in JJK dies. I feel like you gotta be really special to not be dead in that show. Tokyo Revengers, I don’t want to beat up a bunch of 15-year-olds. I’m not interested in that. I do think though that the world of Kaiju No. 8 could be really fun. Everyone’s getting power-ups. You have the ability to help people and you’re protecting a city from these giant monsters. […] You know you could just get hurt a little bit, get a little roughed up, but shoot some big monsters and have a good time. I think yeah Kaiju No. 8 for sure.”
We’d like to thank Adam McArthur for taking the time to speak with us about an incredibly successful career spanning countless memorable characters and countless amazing series. It was truly an enlightening and insightful conversation.
Featured image courtesy of Katz Public Relations
Photographer: Matt Kallish @matt_kallish
Stylist: Rachel Nicole @facebyrach
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