Ryan Colt Levy And Reagan Murdock Cut Into Dubbing Chainsaw Man – Exclusive Interview

“Chainsaw Man” is a series that goes way over the top in a way that has a sense of humor to it, but the characters’ emotions are nonetheless played seriously. How do you approach that tonal balance when voice acting in the show?

Ryan Colt Levy: You almost answered it in the question. The characters are designed to be taken seriously, and that’s what helps make the big stuff feel digestible in a way that doesn’t feel like it’s coming out of left field or that it’s some genre mash that doesn’t fit.

The way that a story like this has to work is the characters have to be played genuinely, because otherwise, I don’t think you’d go on that journey with them. You have to believe a man with a chainsaw head. You have to first believe in the heart, in his body.

Reagan Murdock: Also, the comedy comes from the characters being so authentic and believable — especially that scene that Denji and Aki have in the alleyway, that infamous one. It only works if both of them are coming at this from a very authentic place: Aki with his very rigid ideas of what a person should be, and Denji completely disregarding that. It’s that clash of these two very real personalities that makes both the serious moments and the comedic moments work so well.

The balance is especially complicated with Denji because his baser instincts would play as pure comic relief in most anime, but they end up being taken more seriously here, even with all the humor.

Levy: Yes. There’s something that’s like because he takes it so seriously and you feel how genuinely this stuff matters to him, it makes it funnier as an outside viewer. [It’s like] in the same way that we got introduced to Kobeni, who can be so genuinely sad, and that’s where the humor comes from.

It’s not because it’s like, “Look at how funny this sadness is.” A lot of the characters, you have to be honest about who they are in that moment, and Denji’s a real 16-year-old kid who hasn’t had a great education at all. He hasn’t had any education, he has no connection to people who’ve ever shown him real affection, and he is raw nerve endings.

He’s all of these feelings at a point in his life where any person is full of all of those feelings and getting thrown into the world for the first time. It’s seeing someone experiencing sensory overload in real-time.