Mix together a slow, burning love song, club light dimness, and Dan Da Dan the way you would chocolate chips and cookie dough and you'll get 2 million views and one of fans' favorite moments in the Netflix anime, immortalized in edits setting Okarun and Momo's first "goodbye" to each other against a juicy slow jam. But, though this scene still enjoys a sweet reception nearly a year after it premiered in Dan Da Dan season one, Okarun's English voice actor A.J. Beckles once worried he wouldn't be able to perform it.
"I think it was rewarding, the way it came out," Beckles tells GamesRadar+ at Anime NYC convention in Manhattan, discussing his hardest scene to record, "but I always kind of reference the scene where [...] Okarun's walking away, and Momo says goodbye, and then he says goodbye, and they're both kind of like, 'What does that mean? Is this goodbye, and we're never going to talk again? Is this small moment in our lives just all it's going to be, or are we going to be friends after this?'"
"Goodbye or goodbye," Beckles continues. "Trying to make that make sense to the viewer and the audience was really frustrating for me, because I was like, 'I can't get it.'"
The final version of the scene feels like high school in the most perfect way, and it no doubt contributes to why Okarun has so many people attempting to unpack his, as one YouTuber calls it, "Unspoken Rizz."
But Beckles says that recording the famous farewell plagued him "to the point where I was like, 'I have to take a break.' I was like, 'I can't do it.' And it was such a simple scene, but, you know, our director [Abel Góngora] was really pushing me."
But sometimes chemistry is just about the reaction. Beckles says it ultimately helped to hear Momo actress Abby Trott perform the scene first, and then he tells me, snapping his fingers, "I was like, 'Oh!'
"We were kind of both like, 'Ohhh!'
"And then we did it, and it ended up being beautiful. And it's gone viral online, that entire scene, and everything like that. So I think it worked out, but it was really frustrating in the moment," Beckles concludes.
"It's always the 'one words' that [are] the most difficult somehow," adds Aira actress Lisa Reimold, "'cause it's like, you can say a line in so many ways, but how can you say one word so many different ways?"
Dan Da Dan is currently zooming along to the end of its second season – keep up to date with new episodes using our Dan Da Dan season 2 release schedule.
