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One Piece season 2's Tony Tony Chopper actor didn't watch the anime ahead of playing the fan-favorite character: "To copy the anime would have been a disservice"
Mikaela Hoover, who voices the oddly cute but surly Tony Tony Chopper in Netflix's One Piece season 2, says she didn't watch the anime before filming the show. Instead, she chose to put her own spin on the character, with One Piece's showrunner and producers reassuring her that One Piece creator Eiichiro Oda would fully approve of her performance.
"I remember after a few sessions saying to [showrunner Joe Tracz] and one of the producers, Steve Welke, 'Should I watch?' And they said, 'Honestly, we love so much what you're doing, you should just keep on this journey. Oda-san picked you for a reason'," Hoover tells THR. Indeed, Oda helped guide Tony Tony Chopper into the live action show, offering up is own advice on how to portray him.
"Now, after filming season two, I have seen some of the anime in Japanese, and the actress is absolutely brilliant, but we're very different, and I think that to copy the anime would have been a disservice," Hoover continues. "I'm sure fans are going to feel a certain way, but I had to let all of that go and just trust my interpretation and trust the work - trust that this is how Oda wanted him portrayed."
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Despite not having seen the anime, Hoover says she connected deeply with Tony Tony Chopper, who is essentially a cute little reindeer guy with a kinda tortured soul, who sometimes turns into a huge monster.
"At the end of the day, he just really wants to be accepted," she explains. "I've also experienced not feeling seen, somebody loving you, and then turning their back on you. I feel so connected to him in those ways that it was easy to pull from my own experiences when I embody him. I feel like I'm healing some childhood wounds in myself."
I've been Newsarama's resident Marvel Comics expert and general comic book historian since 2011, and now I'm the Entertainment Writer at GamesRadar+. I've also been the on-site reporter at most major comic conventions such as Comic-Con International: San Diego, New York Comic Con, and C2E2. Outside of comic journalism, I am the artist of many weird pictures, and the guitarist of many heavy riffs. (They/Them)
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