The Tokyo Revengers panel on Friday was a bit delayed from its 4:45PM start, but after a couple minutes A.J. Beckles (Takemichi), Nicolas Roye (Kisaki), & Sean Chiplock (Draken) arrived to get things going. After an introduction (Sean made a joke involving Jonah Scott and Matthew Mercer and conventions going to Sean when can’t find someone as attractive and is more affordable compared to those two; apparently Sean used his Jonah Scott voice to book Draken) they noted it was a Q&A so fans in attendance could ask questions, but Sean had to ask A.J. what it was like to jump from being in a lead role for the first time in his VA career.
And A.J. explained it all got started…while he was auditioning for To Your Eternity!
To clarify, A Silent Voice is one of his favorite works so the opportunity to try and book a role in To Your Eternity was hard to pass up, but A.J. was also auditioning for Tokyo Revengers. He looked up who Takamichi was, and initially he was not at all sure about this character with the pompadour and thought he came across as lame. Needless to say that he did book it, read the manga, and loved it. In the process he learned a ton about voiceover work since he had to do 44 hours of recording for Takemichi and at the same time he was also doing work on Kemono Jihen (played Shiki).
A.J. then asked Nicolas his thoughts on playing Kisaki. Nicolas explained he had to go from normally playing the hero or good character to voicing his first villain in Kisaki. At one point during the recording sessions he got told that he was making Kisaki come across as too nice, so his director concocted a scenario for Nicolas to make him come across like he’s been investing in cryptocurrency for like a week to nail how he should sound. This experience, he mentioned, served him well as he plays another villain in the current season of Jujutsu Kaisen (Playing Toji).
For Sean, it was a case where he had to play the mentor figure, which is unusual since he’s used to playing younger protagonist type of roles. After reading up on Draken’s character he believes this is a different retelling of King Arthur and Draken is essentially Merlin, and he came to this conclusion before the major fight outside the church in Season 2 of Tokyo Revengers. He also has a theory about what will happen to Draken based on Merlin and how the series has gone, but with the anime still ongoing it’s just speculation.
After then talking more about their characters, the guests then took questions from the attendees. First they answered what’s been their favorite scenes they’ve recorded so far. Sean said the hospital scene with Draken and Mikey is one of his favorites; Nicolas’ favorite is one of his early scenes where Kisaki says “What will it be? Face or gut?”
A.J. mentioned a scene he did that was “fun” to do — the moment with Akkun on the rooftop in Episode 4 that he believed was a pivotal moment for Takamichi. “If I don’t get this scene right, I’m just not understanding the character.” said A.J. His actual fun scene was in Season 2 when Takamichi and Mikey meet in the Philippines and how Aleks Le portrayed Mikey in that scene was so good that A.J. wanted to try and 1-up him.
Then they answered if there was any major changes after Disney acquired the streaming rights to Tokyo Revengers S2. While they couldn’t answer the production side of things (licensing, distribution), etc, the director was the same as Season 1, but the team was different. They did speculate that there’s likely some people in Disney dipping their toes on properties to pick up since they see anime merchandise in Hot Topic and other stores. Sean then noted a shift in general in agencies, as you didn’t have a union agent that was interested due to the low pay and was not something most people worked on 10 or 15 years ago. But once the market grew, the passion of the individuals, and the pay rate increased thanks to efforts from CODA (The pay rate increased from $75 to $125 an hour), it was no longer a niche media and nowadays there’s union production on more anime projects. A.J. talked about how back in the day you were bullied for wearing a Naruto shirt — now you can see kids in school with a My Hero Academia backpack.
In response to a question on if there was any scenes A.J did where he went, “Oh god I have to voice that?” Well, for the most part the scenes where Takamichi is crying was not what A.J. was looking forward to. A.J. then answered whether or not most of Takamichi’s problems would be resolved if he could actually fight. “No” he said at one point. “Maybe” at another point. All seriousness, it would be interesting to think about about, but A.J. mentioned that the point of the story would be lost if Takamichi could fight since he was never capable of fighting.
The guests ended up being asked to name a fun or memorable Tokyo Revengers scene or a scene from a different work — Nicolas recalled one day going to the studio and being told by the director that there was going to be some seriousness wailing with Kisaki, which ended up not happening after they watched the Japanese episode, so he didn’t have to go too far with his crying.
Sean did mention one memorable scene was ASMR sessions involving his Mr Love: Queen’s Choice character, Kiro. His director was female and most of the time whether or not he had to redo a line depended on if he was “giving the tingles.” “‘I like what you did but I’m not feeling tingly, I’m not getting the tingles’ Can you imagine as a married man with a female director ask you to do a line again and says ‘give me the tingles, give me more of the tingles’?!?!” he had remarked at one point to describe how wild that was.
They did get a few questions aside from Tokyo Revengers during the panel. One question is was there a voice they’ve done that pushed their limits too far. “My first ever audition was Jujutsu Kaisen, and I have to impress them!” The pressure A.J. put on himself was too much and he blew his voice out; one that’s been tough that he has been cast in was Poison Mushroom Cookie (Cookie Run: Kingdom) due to the character whispering and also yelling. Nicolas’ answer was the voice of Sailor Moon’s younger brother Shingo, where he was told to go as young for his lines almost every session. Like if he would say his lines he would be told to go even younger and due to his schedule and this being his first anime, he was a little stressed whenever he went for a session.
While Nicolas recalled his time with Shingo, this made Sean recount a time where there was a studio, one of the leads took him aside and told him that after replaying Sean’ lines and noting they weren’t sounding the same anymore, if he couldn’t figure out what he was doing it would be difficult to pitch him to clients like they used to. The one character Sean gave as an example of pushing their limits was Shiki (EDENS ZERO) due to Shiki’s personality (he acts and then thinks about things later).
They did eventually get a question from someone asking about the current AI situation (Nicolas was more vociferous about this, explaining that it does seem more media driven and fear based than this should be, and it may be something to be concerned about a few years from now) but they largely can’t do much about it mostly because it’s out of their control. Sean noted, while in complete solidarity with his fellow VAs, how the one silver lining with the threat of AI is this is going to force actors to think about how they perform, how they’re delivering their scenes, and how they’re exploring their characters.
A.J. believes there should be restrictions for AI, and Sean agreed while also bringing up a possible scenario where someone could use his voice to say something he didn’t actually say and he would get in trouble for it — so the worst case scenario of using AI improperly is where the major concern is. In other words, due to AI being more of an aggregation tool rather than a creation tool and if this won’t be addressed in the interest of profit, that leads to major problems.
The panel then wrapped up with an attendee asking the guests to brag about their pets (see: A.J. talking about a couple of his cats and one dog, Nicolas following a few Maine Coon cat accounts on Instagram, and Sean talked about the unplanned cats in their home).