Red-Haired Shanks has been confirmed to appear in the upcoming live-action One Piece series.
The official Twitter account for Netflix's reboot revealed that Peter Gadiot, who played Cyrus in ABC's Once Upon A Time in Wonderland, will portray the charismatic pirate captain. In the short video, Gadiot confirms that he is in Cape Town, South Africa, where the new series is being filmed.
Red-Haired Shanks is a major character in the One Piece manga and anime. In addition to serving as the captain of the alcohol loving Red-Haired Pirates, he is also one of the Four Emperors, a title given to the four most powerful pirate captains of the New World. The character will play a key role in the series' next animated film, One Piece Film: Red, which is scheduled to be released in Japan later this year and will feature the debut of a new female character, as well as new costumes for the Straw Hat Pirates.
In addition to Gadiot, the series will star Iñaki Godoy (Go, Youth!) as the series' rubbery hero Monkey D. Luffy, Taz Skylar (Boiling Point) as the fighting chef Sanji, Mackenyu (Chihayafuru) as the swordsman Roronoa Zoro, Emily Rudd (Fear Street) as the navigator Nami and Jacob Romero Gibson (Greenleaf) as the sniper Usopp. Earlier this month, Netflix announced a few additional cast members, including Vincent Regan, who will play Luffy's grandfather, Monkey D. Garp, and numerous characters from the original manga's Romance Dawn arc, including Ilia Isorelýs Paulino (The Sex Lives of College Girls), who will portray the antagonistic pirate Iron Mace Alvida.
The new series began filming in early February. Several cast and crew members on the series posted images of their arrival to Cape Town, but so far, Netflix has yet to release any images of the cast in costume or on set. A sharp-eyed fan managed to capture the first images of the show's pirate ships, one of which was clearly Alvida's distinctive flagship, the Miss Love Duck.
One Piece kicked off its adventure on the high seas in Weekly Shonen Jump in 1998. In the 24 years since its debut, the story of Luffy and his ragtag crew of Straw Hat pirates has become the best-selling manga series of all time, with approximately half-a-billion copies in circulation around the world.
Source: Twitter