Netflix has announced a boat-load of new casting details for its upcoming live-action One Piece series.
The streaming company announced several new additions to the cast, who will mostly be playing supporting or antagonistic characters from the manga's original Romance Dawn arc. Morgan Davies from The Evil Dead: Rise will portray Koby, one of the first people protagonist Monkey D. Luffy befriends on his journey. Davies will be joined by Aidan Scott (Between the Devil) who will portray the spoiled Helmeppo. Vincent Regan will play Monkey D. Garp, Luffy's grandfather. The series' first set of antagonists has also been cast: Ilia Isorelýs Paulino from The Sex Lives of College Girls will portray Iron Mace Alvida, one of the first rival pirate captains that Luffy goes up against. Jeff Ward (Brand New Cherry Flavor) will portray Buggy the Star Clown, the captain of the Buggy Pirates, while Ozark's McKinley Belcher III has been cast in the role of Arlong the Saw, the captain of a mostly fish-man crew.
The live-action One Piece was first announced in 2017. The series is the second collaboration between Netflix and Tomorrow Studios, with the first being the short-lived Cowboy Bebop live-action series. The series will star Go, Youth! and Who Killed Sara?'s Iñaki Godoy as the stretchy hero Monkey D. Luffy. The series will also star Boiling Point's Taz Skylar as the fighting chef Sanji and Japanese-American actor Mackenyu (Rurouni Kenshin: Final Chapter, Chihayafuru, Pacific Rim: Uprising) as the swordsman Roronoa Zoro. Emily Rudd (Fear Street, Hunters) will portray the Straw Hats' greedy navigator, Nami and Jacob Romero Gibson (Greenleaf, All Rise) will play the role of Usopp. Series creator Eiichiro Oda is serving as an executive producer on this new adaptation of his work.
Iron-Mace Alvida was first confirmed to be in the series when eagle-eyed fans captured pictures of her distinct, duck-shaped pirate ship on the show's set in South Africa. The set photos also showed several other pirate vessels in various stages of construction, though no has been able to determine which of the series' ships those were meant to be. The series began filming in early February, with several members of the cast and crew sharing photos from the set.
Oda's One Piece first sailed onto the pages of Weekly Shonen Jump over 24 years ago. The story of the Straw Hat Pirates is now the best selling manga series of all time by a wide margin, with about half-a-billion copies in circulation worldwide. The One Piece manga is available in English from VIZ Media. The full anime series can be streamed from Funimation and Crunchyroll, while parts of the series are available on Hulu and Netflix.
Source: Netflix