Jujutsu Kaisen Stars Talk Yuji and Yuta’s Main Character Clash in Season 3 (Exclusive)

Jujutsu Kaisen Season 3 finally brought both Yuji Itadori and Yuta Okkotsu back to the spotlight for the first real time, and the stars behind the series opened up about sharing the spotlight as the anime’s two main characters. Jujutsu Kaisen’s third season picks up after everything that happened during the Shibuya Incident, and Yuji was lost without much direction or many allies at his side. Thankfully, Yuta made his return to the franchise to help out but the two of them needed to go through a major fight before it all happened.

Speaking with ComicBook, Yuta voice actor Kayleigh McKee and Yuji voice actor Adam McArthur opened up about sharing the stage together as main characters for Jujutsu Kaisen’s third season, and the two of them explained how they were both able to tap into the different kind of energies that series creator Gege Akutami imbued them with over the course of his work with the franchise in order to separate them as characters even more. With just some playful competitiveness in between.

Jujutsu Kaisen Stars Talk Yuji vs. Yuta

“Even though I had started reading the manga, I hadn’t read Jujutsu Kaisen 0 so I didn’t know what I was getting into,” McKee stated when asked about joining the franchise as Yuta. “I was like, ‘side character for the movie.’ Recorded it in like 15 minutes, sent it out. And then I got the role and my agent was like, ‘You know this is like main character for the movie, right? Original main character [who’s] going to be really big in the series.’” And that led to McKee preparing even harder for the role, “I feel like I was prepping for it the whole time.”

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“As we get there, I think I’m just having as much fun with it as I can, and really just trying to do justice by bringing that flavor of main character energy,” McKee continued. “I really feel like they both have very different flavors of like main character energy because they were written at different stages of Gege [Akutami’s] development of the world.” This is something McArthur seconded as he explained there was no actual competition between the stars over who the “real MC” is for the anime, “I’m a competitive person. I’ve competed in martial arts my whole entire life, but at this stage in my life, I more so just enjoy a good game, like a fun competition.”

Who Is Jujutsu Kaisen’s Real Main Character?

“I’m not competitive in terms of like outcome, so I don’t care about win or lose. I just like the act of competing,” McArthur continued. “Kaylee and I always have this playful banter of like who the real MC is. I post videos where I’m like joking around that like someone said to me that Yuta was the MC, so I like launched them across the room or something like that. But there’s no actual competition. I feel like coming back to season three, I was more excited to see Yuta and Yuji finally get on the same side of things so that they could work together. I think that is really exciting. I think just in terms of like a character type, like what makes a good main character and stuff like that.”

McArthur also explains why Yuji gets a bit of an edge as a lead, however, “I think we see these like OP fan favorite characters that people really gravitate towards. That is always fun to see as a lead in a series. But I also think there is really something special about the everyday man, like the guy who’s just the regular kid who all of a sudden is thrown into this world that makes it really relatable for an audience…And then to see him have the odds stacked against him throughout the entirety of all of this just makes you want to root for the guy. So I think that makes a really special MC.”

What do you think? Are Yuji and Yuta both great main characters for Jujutsu Kaisen? Leave a comment below and join the conversation now in the ComicBook Forum!