Jujutsu Kaisen has been a smash hit and a lot of that is due to its dynamic cast including Yuji Itadori, Nobara Kugisaki, and Satorou Gojou. At this year’s Crunchyroll Expo, which marks the convention’s return since the beginning of the pandemic and its first outing since Crunchyroll was bought by Sony, we got the chance to speak with the incredible English dub voice actors who bring those characters to life. Here, we get into the hype for the severe emotional damage that is Shibuya, the acting process, the importance of their characters, and some of their favorite experiences voicing for the series.
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To kick things off, we asked about Season 2 and whether the cast had read ahead in the manga. Kaiji Tang, the voice of Gojou explained “We get a glimpse into Gojo’s Past. And that’s kind of fun because even as undisciplined as he is in the modern day, he’s even less so in the past…So that’s going to be fun to explore and there are going to be many formative moments in his life that happen throughout that little arc that I’m really looking forward to doing it.” Anne Yatco added, that without spoilers, all she could say for Nobara’s future in Jujutsu Kaisen Season 2 was “denial.” While Adam McArthur, the voice of Yuji said “Season 2 is going to be so meaty. To see it animated and to be an actor in something so juicy is really exciting.”
Of course with the excitement, the trio has definitely read ahead in the manga past the events of Season 1 of the anime. But does reading ahead in the source material help the acting process?
Yatco answered, “I like to know where you’re going because to me it’s like if you’re doing a play or a movie you would have the whole script.” She added, “For me, it’s just about being able to say ‘okay, I can live in the moment’ and ‘this scene acts as X in the larger picture.'”
Tang hit a more split view, “I’m weirdly 50/50 on this…Coming from theater it does you a lot of good to have as much rehearsal time as possible even if it is reading ahead in the manga.” Adding, “At the same time, I’ve been doing VO for about 15 years now and all I do every day is go in without knowing anything that I’m working on, and then the director will come in and go ‘this is what’s happening today.” And this impulsivity is important to the process, as Tang explains, “I have this weird muscle memory of that sort of performance that I can do either…At this point in my life, it’s an equal amount of good.”
McArthur shares his “hot take” on the “do you read ahead” question, agreeing first that it’s important to be collaborative and work in the moment but also that if you’re an actor going into a large shonen series you got to read ahead, he expanded “For shows that are more complicated it’s 100% more helpful to know where you’re going. Because exactly what you said, ‘what is the function of this?’ You really have to play up the fact, some of the Yuji, Nanami, Mahito stuff, you need to know where you’re going so you can know how hard to lean in.” He ended with a point that by reading ahead, “you are honoring the original more, as well as the source material.”
Diving into their characters, Tang, Yatco, and McArthur shared the moments involving their characters, big and small that impacts them. For Yuji, McArthur explains that his moments with Todo were the “large” ones that he sees as his favorite and the more intimate one is the moment between Yuji and Nobara in the forest, “He asks her if she’s okay because she’s not okay, basically. And asking her how she’s okay killing.”
Yatco builds on the moment, explaining that one of the most important moments for Nobara is her explaining how she lets stuff go “You only have so many chairs for people to sit on in your life. Sometimes people stroll up with their own chair but there are only so many chairs that you can care about. So you have to let the rest go. And I would say that, that is so powerful.”
And for her large moment, of course it’s her curse activation. “The fight with Momo and the swinging hammer, I was looking forward to recording that for months.”
Embracing the chaos that is Gojo, Tang says his favorite big moment in the series for Gojou is the fight Jogo, “The Gojou versus Joto fight was really fun, I felt really bad for Jogo the whole time. Gojou is such a dick the whole time…I mean come on, take it seriously.” But despite that fight being one of the most hilarious and disrespectful moments for an anime, Tang explains the importance of one of the smaller moments from Jujutsu Kaisen 0: The Movie:
“There’s a moment between him and Geto towards the end, and he has to go from that straight to the end of the film where all of the students have wrapped everything up. To see his reaction immediately after that moment…It appears that it doesn’t affect him in the way that you thought it would and it told me a lot about his mental place. It told me so much about the character that he was able to move on from that moment to go on and have fun with these students afterward.”
For more on the characters, the actors, and the Crunchyroll Expo 2022, hit play on the video above.
