Netflix’s One Piece: Taz Skylar Reflects on the Reaction to His Casting

One Piece is now in the works on Season 2 with Netflix, and Taz Skylar opened up about how he felt seeing reactions to his casting as Sanji for the very first time! One Piece’s live-action adaptations was not only one of the most successful launches with Netflix in recent memory, but it was also one of the most well received anime to live-action adaptations as well. This was due to the strength of the core cast at the center of it all, but fans were much less open to the cast when they were first announced to be involved with the project. 

Skylar and the rest of the live-action Straw Hats were suddenly faced with tons of reactions when Netflix first announced they would be leading the live-action One Piece cast, and opening up about during Paris Fan Festival (as shared by Roster Con on YouTube), Skylar met a lot of that criticism head on as he experienced suddenly getting waves of reactions from thousands of people for the first real time. 

Taz Skylar on One Piece Casting Reactions

“The day the announcement came out, all our names went to the top of the list on Twitter…” Skylar began. “I was getting screenshots from my friends saying like, ‘Hey bro, your name is trending on Twitter. And I was like ‘Huh,’ and he sent me the screenshot and it was like, ‘Sanji Eminem.’ I laugh because I was like, ‘You know what they have a point. I do kinda look a little bit like Eminem” So it didn’t really offend me.”

But while the initial react didn’t phase him, things changed when he got negative reactions to trying Sanji’s kicks for the first time, “Then when I first started trying to kick, I think that was the first one that really hurt my feelings because I admittedly came from nothing. Like I never tried that before, and I wanted to try. I wanted to do my best and so I started kicking, and like anything when you first start it, you suck. You’re really bad at it, and it’s normal cause that’s what not knowing how to do something looks like. But I was trying…I don’t really know how people got those videos because they were on my phone and nobody knew who I was.” 

Continuing further, “Somebody had those videos and they leaked them, and that kind of went a little viral. There was a lot of negativity there. I remember kind of scrolling through them thinking, ‘Oh, this is going to be hard.’ It was, having never dealt with that before. Having never dealt with thousands of people saying at the same time, ‘This is going to fail. This is horrible. You are horrible.’ It took me a minute to deal with it, and my way of dealing with it was I went and I got two black belts, and a blue belt. And now nobody can say shit.”

Netflix’s One Piece Season 2 has yet to announce a release date or window as of the time of this publication.