Kaiju No. 8 Star Adam McArthur Talks Jujutsu Kaisen, Megan Thee Stallion and More

Adam McArthur has been in some of the biggest anime and animated releases in recent memory, and ComicBook recently got the chance to speak with the voice actor about some of his biggest roles so far. Anime fans might recognize McArthur as the voice behind some key English dub releases of anime such as Kaiju No. 8, Jujutsu Kaisen, Tokyo Revengers and more. Chances are if you have been watching anime in the last few years specifically, then you have heard McArthur in some of the biggest roles. So big that we just had to ask McArthur all about his experiences.

McArthur recently sat down with ComicBook and we got the chance to ask him all about some of the bigger hits of his long career such as his take on Reno Ichikawa in Kaiju No. 8, Yuji Itadori in Jujutsu Kaisen (and surprisingly in a Megan Thee Stallion track), and even went further back to ask about his time as Marco Diaz in Star vs. the Forces of the Evil.

Read on below for our interview (which has been edited for length and clarity) with Adam McArthur celebrating some of his biggest roles, and let us know how you feel in the comments!

NICK VALDEZ, COMICBOOK: Right now, you’re involved with one of the biggest Kaiju blockbusters we’ve seen with Kaiju No. 8. It’s had a huge release in terms of not only getting the dub at the same time as the original, but we’re also seeing it on X. For you who’s at the center of all of this, how do you feel seeing the response to Kaiju No. 8 so far?

ADAM MCARTHUR: Kaiju No. 8 is the perfect example of cohesive marketing. It’s amazing because, it doesn’t happen very often in anime, weirdly. And that’s not necessarily a critique or anything like that. It’s just when you’re licensing stuff from Japan and it’s here, you have hoops to jump through for promoting here. It has to have approval here, and then it also has to have approval in Japan. So sometimes rollouts of these shows can be very clunky. And with Kaiju No. 8 everything just seems to be firing on all cylinders, and it’s really, really cool.

Everything on this show from the music, to the action, to the characters, to the story…I tell people one of the things I love most about it is you can get attached to the characters because they don’t die. So you know the stakes are still high, but it’s not like other shows that I’ve been a part of where you know your favorite character is gone the next week. It’s been really cool to be a part of this show, and having bands like One Republic, and artists like Youngblood be a part of the the music. I think it’s bringing in a lot of people who might not necessarily, have watched before.

It’s really felt like a worldwide celebration. You star as the deuteragonist, Reno Ichikawa, who is pretty much the real second in command. Even though Kafka is the guy who turns into Kaiju No. 8, Reno is a lot of the heart of the series. So what has been your favorite Ichikawa moment so far?

There’s so many fun moments. This show actually really caught me off guard. I didn’t know I was gonna be working on it, up until a couple of weeks before and and a couple of weeks after Jujutsu Kaisen Season 2 had ended, I got cast. I was very excited. I knew it was gonna be cool, but I hadn’t done a super deep dive into the manga at that point. I knew it was gonna be cool, but what caught me off guard was how funny it is. The show is so funny, and Kafka and Reno are truly like an odd couple, and their dynamic together, I think, like you said, just has so much heart.

My favorite Reno moment is probably right after Kafka swallows the Kaiju in the hospital and they break out of the hospital. There’s that whole running sequence where, if you haven’t seen the show and you’re reading this, Kafka pees out of his nipples. That’s a thing that happens. So there’s that. There’s just the realization of the craziness that they’re gonna be getting into with this new transformation, and it’s so much fun.

[Kaiju No. 8] Season 2 is coming up later this year. What are you hoping to see for Ichikawa? Now that you’ve gone through a whole season with him and got to explore his character a bit, what are you hoping to see next?

I’m excited for Ichikawa to keep leveling up. I think him and Kafka both have their journeys to go through. And I think, while Ichikawa’s resolve is strong and he’ll never give up, and that’s his thing, I think he has a long ways to go to reach his full potential. So I’m excited to see maybe more of what gives him that mindset, maybe some backstory. I always love when an author and an anime put characters in really tough positions, and we get to see how they react and how they get out of those. So I would like to see Ichikawa in some some tough positions.

I’m curious as to your approach to anime dubbing in general. You’ve mentioned reading the manga [with Kaiju No.8], is that something you do when signed on to a role? What kind of research do you do before jumping into a new role?

It really depends. I try and do as much of a deep dive as I can. I feel it’s really important as an actor to be connected to the source material, and to have that knowledge. I also have peers who prefer to be surprised when they’re in the booth. They want to have a surprise reaction when they’re acting. But for me, I like to know where the the story is headed so that I can maybe pepper in some foreshadowing here and there. It helps me understand why a scene is in place if I know what the payoff is later. So I feel like it’s important to do that.

So for shows like Kaiju No. 8 where I’m coming in at the beginning, as soon as I got cast, boom, I started reading the manga. Made sure I knew what was going on, who is Ichikawa, what he’s all about, what’s his relationship like with Kafka. And, same thing for Jujutsu Kaisen. The other thing I try not to pay too much attention to…these shows both have had so much hype prior to them releasing, which can be a hindrance, and I try to ignore it. But where I do let it impact me is I got to make sure I’m prepared. I can’t go in and just be like, “Ah well, we’ll see what happens.” So I do try and and read the source material and be ready.

Some shows, it’s just simply not possible. For example, I voice a character named [Saigiku Jouno] in Bungo Stray Dogs, and he comes in Season 5. I got the call, I think at like 9PM the night before they needed me in the session at 9AM. And I’m like, “Alright. There’s no way I’m reading all of Bungo Stray Dogs tonight or watching four and a half seasons of anime to try and get caught up.” So in that case, I’m very reliant on the director who’s been with the project since the beginning, and them to sort of help guide me and guide the performance. Those are always kind of the scarier sessions because you are really relinquishing control, and it becomes even more collaborative than animation already is. But, yeah, it sort of just depends on the project.

The Jujutsu Kaisen of it all is very interesting in terms of the kind of the pressures you’ve faced as not only did it have hype beforehand, but it kind of hit a whole new scale following Season 2. As Yuji Itadori himself, how are you feeling right now after absorbing it all? How is it sitting with you?

Right now, I would say I’m sitting in a pretty good spot. I feel very proud of the work the cast did for Season 2. I think we all really did a great job, and I’m very critical. I’m very critical. My castmates, I think they’re all stellar no matter what they do. But I’m very critical of myself, and Jujutsu Kaisen was a beast. Going into Season 1, the context of it all for us was it was October of 2020, so we were in the thick of COVID. Everyone’s recording from their home. And for me, it was a brand new studio, a brand new director, and a brand new genre. It was the first anime I had ever worked in.

So stepping into the booth with all of that happening and mind you, because we’re recording from home on our own, we’re not only actors. We’re also now audio engineers handling the audio we’re sending to the studios as they record remotely and all this stuff, so it was a lot of pressure for Season One. I would say that I didn’t necessarily know how much I could decide on my own about how I wanted things to sound tonally and how I wanted them to go. I feel like you hear a little shift.

Side note, every new show that happens there’s an adjustment period for the actors. If you go back to Friends, you’re like “Wow, they’re really different than they end up.” So I have to be a little gracious with myself, but I do feel like I settled in probably around episode four or five of Season One. Then tonally, I just feel like with the Shibuya Incident and the Hidden Inventory arc, everyone was just delivering fantastic performances week over week. It’s been good, but it’s a lot of pressure. It is a lot of pressure, but it’s a lot of fun, I think.

Yuji goes through some really rough stuff in [Jujutsu Kaisen] Season 2, so as a performer, where do you go to dig into those dark places? Because he’s going through some really tough emotions.

It’s tough, man. The first scene that’s the big tough one in Season 2 is when Sukuna gives Yuji back his body, and he sees the devastation that Sukuna has caused. And, obviously, I’ve never leveled a portion of Tokyo, so it’s hard to relate on the scale that it happened in. But I will say what I try and do is I think about what Yuji’s feeling in that moment. And to me, Yuji’s feeling an immense amount of guilt and, how could he have done this? But guilt was sort of this thing that I kept going back to. The actor’s job is to sort of bridge the gap between you and the character. Well, the thing is, coincidentally, I’ve felt an immense amount of guilt throughout my life. I think we all have and everyone can relate.

I do think that’s why that moment is so relatable and so impactful. But for me, I sort of just have to think about those times where I felt those things and, what it meant to not only me, but what it meant to the people around me and why I was feeling that way. Then when I go into the booth and I’m recording those lines, those emotions that I’ve just sort of not re-lived, but that I can remember and that I’ve experienced in my life, they’re just available to call upon during those moments. It was really important for me to make sure that all of the difficult, emotional, tearful scenes with Yuji felt really real and not like an anime main character crying. You know? I wanted people to know that I was leaving the booth, and bursting into tears in my car because it’s just so heavy.

I feel like it all turned out really, really well. There’s a few episodes back to back that had stuff like that. And so it was interesting because, I’d go in and I’d record for sometimes 20 minutes because that portion of that episode is such a short thing. That’s all Yuji’s in the episode for. So my session was fifteen, twenty minutes long. You go in with all this emotion kind of ready to draw on, and you do this really emotional scene. And then the director clicks the button, and they’re like, “Alright. Thank you so much. Great job, Adam. I’ll see you next week.” It was a little more somber than that at that point.

But it’s just a really interesting thing. I have to leave and get in my car, go home and pretend like everything’s normal and I’m fine, and then be ready to be in that headspace the week after. At the end of Season Two, I was like “I finally understand why actors need a break from certain characters,” And, I was like, “Can I just do a romance anime? Where’s Food Wars when you need it? Give me a cooking show or something. But then Kaiju No. 8 came came along, and I got to have a lot of fun with that one. So it all works.

Speaking of fun, as Yuji you got to have a little bit of fun in a pretty prominent way with Megan Thee Stallion for “Otaku Hot Girl.” How did that even come together? Were you approached by her team? Talk me through the process a little bit.

Well, Nick, I’m a rap god, and they listened to my mixtape, which dropped. I’m just kidding. So back in 2021, the episode came out of Jujutsu Kaisen where Todo asked Yuji, “What kind of woman’s your type?” And he said, “I like a tall woman with a nice big ass like Jennifer Lawrence.” So when that came out, I like to pay attention to what fan reactions are and what the fans are saying about episodes. I feel very much like this is a community we’re all equal participants in. So I like to be in there and see what’s going on.

I saw that there was a group of people who were like, “You know, Jennifer Lawrence, nothing against her.” I mean, I think she’s fine. But they were, like, “Tall, big ass. We could do better than this. What about Megan Thee Stallion?” And I was like, “Listen. I’m a man of the people.” If the people are gonna request it, I have to respond. So I went into my home studio, and I re-dubbed myself saying, “I like a tall woman with a nice big ass like Grammy winner Megan Thee Stallion,” and that video has lived on my TikTok and Twitter since 2021. Basically, the long and short of it is they licensed the audio from my post and used it in her track. That’s how it all came to be.

I would say that probably the funniest part is I didn’t know what was happening until the song was out. I wasn’t aware that it was happening. All of this stuff was happening behind the scenes. I’m sitting at home one Thursday night. Like, I had just finished dinner. It might have been around, 9:00 or something like that. My phone just started blowing up and everyone was, “Congratulations. Congratulations, Ninja Mac” on all this stuff. “Oh my god. I can’t believe Ninja Mac’s on a Megan Thee Stallion song.” And I was like, “What are they talking about?” Then shortly, obviously, a little Internet sleuthing that didn’t take more than twenty seconds, found out that they had, used the audio, and it was being licensed. And, yeah, I’m on a Megan Thee Stallion song, which is just crazy.

That’s not something everybody could say.

Yeah, trust me. That’s why I’m leaning into it. That’s why my auto response is that I’m a rap god now.

Rounding out the questions here, one of the roles that I know you very well for is Marco Diaz in Star vs. the Forces of Evil. I love the show, but it’s been so long since it ended. I do have to ask as there are shows that come back with reboots, sequels, or other projects. I saw you’ve done work with Chibiverse as the character, so if there ever was a full Star vs. the Forces of Evil revival, is that something you’d be interested in returning for?

There’s zero question in my mind about what I would do in that situation. I would 100% come back to voice Marco. This year is our ten year anniversary of its premiere, and it’s the six year anniversary of it finishing. You know the way it ended left so much else to be done and I think the show has legs. If Disney wanted to do a movie or a miniseries or something like that, the fandom would go crazy. So, yeah, like I said, I’m a man of the people. I want to do it. I know that people would love it.

I hear all the time from fans how much the show means to them and how special it was, and I do truly believe that it was a unicorn show for Disney. No pun intended. But I do think that it was. Gravity Falls was also one of these shows, but it came right on the heels of Gravity Falls, and so a lot of those fans came to Star. It was just a really special time in the type of shows that Disney was making. And from it we saw shows like Amphibia and The Owl House go on to tell these serialized, episodic shows that are not very common in for “kids animation.” I hope at some point we get to do some more of it. I’d love to see what Star and Marco are up to. I have my theories about magic and if it’s really gone, who the real villain is, and what what we could see.

Just as a fan, what would you want to see from Marco if they came back with something new?

We’re in a whole new location. Earth and Mewni have collided. Star and Marco are together. I think it would be really interesting to see what would happen if magic wasn’t actually destroyed, but maybe it was just dispersed. And maybe Toffee is actually back and kind of helped orchestrate all this. He wanted magic spread out because then it meant that it would be harder to actually defeat him. And Mina Loveberry, who we met as the villain in the end of Season 4, was actually a big distraction. Star and Marco realized magic’s not dead and they have to go on this quest to restore what little there is left to defeat Toffee. I just think it would be so cool.

We could do that with maybe a little time skip, so they’re a little bit older. I mean, anime is so popular now and Star had such an influence from shows like Sailor Moon that it might be cool to just switch up the genre and do something a little bit more anime. That’d be so cool. There’s just so much potential. It would be so cool for, I don’t know, Disney to wake up and utilize it. Maybe they are! I don’t know. They don’t tell me, I’m just an actor. Maybe right now [series creator Daron Nefcy]’s at Disney, and she’s writing something that I don’t know about. It’s all possible.