Damien Haas has an impressive number of showings across anime, television, video games, and even collectives like Smosh. At this year’s Anime Central, we had the opportunity to sit down for a quick conversation with him about his career, switching between different kinds of roles and mediums, and more.
You’ll recognize Haas as the voice behind Laios in Delicious in Dungeon, Shez in Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes, Van Arkride in Trails through Daybreak, and Ryoga in Ranma ½. He’s also been a recurring cast member of Smosh since 2018, taking part in some hilarious skits and interactions.
Portions of this interview have been lightly edited for clarity.
Q: My first question is: how do you switch gears between the many different mediums and forms of media that you work with?
A: I think what gets me in different gears is just being excited about what I’m doing for the day. It’s not too hard to leave a specific voice acting job behind for the day when it’s time to Twitch stream because it’s a totally different discipline, you know? Same with sketch comedy for Smosh. It’s whatever I’m doing; I want to be present and focused on it.
Q: Which of your voice acting roles has challenged you the most and why?
A: I think Kiyoka Kudou has probably been the biggest challenge for me, from My Happy Marriage. His voice profile is very different than what I would usually go towards. It’s the first time as a larger character that I had to sort of be in a very different mode while also occupying some very different vocal emotional range. So it took a while for me to settle into that and be comfortable. But once I did, I was really pleasantly surprised with how comfortable it’s become.
Q: Has your experience and time on Smosh affected your voice acting career?
A: That’s an interesting question. I’ve been voice acting about fifteen years now. Smosh has been for about seven or eight. I think when it comes to being a creative individual — I’m sure you probably get this too — everything you do influences you as an artist and as a performer. So I may not be able to point to one specific thing I’ve gotten from Smosh, but the fact that I get to work with so many talented people, experience their characters, their style of humor, it’s only helped me grow as a comedian and as an actor. So you can’t really separate those things when you talk about your growth overall. It’s definitely impacted me positively. I just can’t say specifically how.
Q: And when you’re voicing a new character, what’s your process for creating a unique voice for that character?
A: It kind of varies, to be honest with you. The most important thing for me to figure out is genre of what I’m trying to portray. I love video games, I love JRPGs, but it’s always going to be a very different voice than a Western action game. So that helps me get into the mode first. Then I start to look at the description of the character and what the lines were that they chose to give me for the audition. If they talk about my character being a protective individual and all my lines are about needing to save someone in my family, now you sort of know what’s important to that person and how serious that is to them.
There’s always little hints and nuggets of information that you can mine out of an audition that give you what your character can be. So I think more important than the voice is the acting. When the acting comes first, the voice comes a little bit later for you.
Q: My last question, kind of related to that, is have you ever improvised lines or moments that made it into the final version of a project?
A: I have. Delicious in Dungeon is a very silly group of individuals. The directors are great, the audio engineers are great, we joke around a lot. So there have been improvised moments that didn’t quite make it in, but there have been much more moments that… I would say something like, “Can I try this really weird read on this line? Can I just try it wacky to see if you like it?” And sometimes that makes it in. For example, Delicious in Dungeon fans, when Laios finds the dryad fruit and says, “Found some.” Originally they just wanted an announcement, and I was like, “Can I do it unhinged? Like I’ve been in the desert for a week without water and I finally found it.” And they were like, “Yeah, try it.” And that version did make it in. And I was like, “Found some!”
We’d like to thank Damien Haas for a fantastic interview and thank the staff of Anime Central for organizing the interview. Anime Central will return next year from May 15 through May 17, 2026. They are currently accepting guest requests for next year’s convention and feedback for this year’s.
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