S O U L M A T E S (SasuNaruSasu Magazine) Soulmates Magazine Nº2 | Page 21

I knew she was, Noriaki was interesting. I
have followed his other anime and seen in-
terviews and listened to him on Junko’s ra-
dio show, so I wasn’t sure what his acting
process was, but I ended up being super im-
pressed with him. I think it’s some of the
best work I’ve seen (heard?) him do outside
of Sasuke. Ofc, Ishida is amazing, too, but…
Noriaki as Nobu… I really wanted to cha-
llenge him, I wanted to challenge all the ac-
tors and give them roles they could sink
their teeth into in some way, I tried to give
those characters many layers (although
whether or not the actors were able to be
aware of all of that through such character
bios, it’s hard to say), but the scenes where
Nobu is shouting or angry… I just want to
pat Noriaki on the back and said “Yes, yes,
sir, you committed, you were amazing, and I
hope you can put that on your reel”. Also,
just in general, how humble they were
when, to me, they are megastars! cided to go with the December recording
date, which meant pushing back the release,
unfortunately, so the Christmas theme
didn’t quite work out how we wanted, but
sometimes artists have a vision, haha. And I
wanted to be true to it! Can’t just have an-
yone play Itachi, you know! If we couldn’t
get Noriaki and Junko, I can tell you that
the alternates for them would’ve been the
seiyuu for Hinata and Kageyama of Hai-
kyuu (Kaito Ishikawa and Ayumu Murase).
Although I did have some say in the names
of the characters for Break Free, Wanda
did a lot of the picking, too. So, essentially
Break Free’s Kaito is named after Kageya-
ma’s seiyuu.
BESIDES NORIAKI AND JUNKO,
WHAT OTHER POPULAR SEIYUU
DID YOU WANT TO INCLUDE IN
YOUR WORK?
I wanted Nakamura-san for sure. In my
head, I wrote Takao as coffee Itachi (from It
Started Over Coffee), and so I saw him as
dry and sarcastic, and I could only think of
Nakamura-san. It had to be him, even if it
meant delaying the recording. At one point,
we did discuss alternatives (including Gin-
toki’s seiyuu) but I needed it to be Nakamu-
ra, and Wanda wanted him, too. So we de- WAS THE DESIGN OF THE CHARAC-
TERS YOUR IDEA?
I would say copyright law is really what’s
responsible for the designs. YFAH, as we
saw, those designs were clearly… Naruto
and Sasuke, but I do believe that became an
issue for Leaves and Bonds. I don’t think
they were sued or anything, but I do think
some stuff came up, but I don’t know the
specifics, so the likeness couldn’t happen
again, and I think even though I’m an SNS
writer, they were trying to distance
themselves from being so obviously Sasu-
WHY?
Heh, well, Haikyuu season 3 was out,
Wanda and I both loved Hinata/Kageyama,
and they were two people we knew had
the same sort of Sasuke/Naruto chemistry.