CURIOSITYHow Naruto Turned a Kid Who Couldn’t Pronounce Anime Into One of Its Biggest Stars5 min read

The Game That Started Everything

Zach Aguilar was eleven years old, deep in a Kingdom Hearts II playthrough, when his little cousin changed his life. “You should watch Naruto,” the cousin said. That was it. That was all it took.

He found the show. He fell hard. He didn’t even know how to say the word “anime” yet — he was going around calling it “enami,” wandering into shops with names like Anime King with zero clue what he was looking at. None of that mattered. The stories hit something in him. Darker, stranger, more personal than anything Western cartoons were putting out for kids his age. Some of the struggles the characters faced, he’d lived versions of them himself.

A Mom, a Manager, and a Lot of Fake Sick Days

He wasn’t new to performing. His mother had set him up with an agent and a manager when he was young — the full Hollywood kid package. She’d call his school, have him cough into the phone, tell them he’d be out all week sick. Then she’d hang up and immediately ring his agent: “He’s free for the next ten days, what can we do?” Headshots. Resumes printed at home. In-person auditions for cereal commercials where the direction was essentially “be excited about this cereal.” He was excited. He booked some of it.

He stopped anyway. At that age, he thought acting was just being himself in a room. Nothing about it felt like a craft. Then he looked up the voice actors from Naruto online, and something clicked into place so hard he still talks about it.

These people didn’t look the way they sounded. At all. Everyone looked different than he’d imagined. They went to conventions and nerded out on panels and were famous — but not too famous. They recorded intimate scenes with a team of three people in a comfortable studio. He thought it was, in his words, “freaking awesome.”