CURIOSITYHow Naruto Turned a Kid Who Couldn’t Pronounce Anime Into One of Its Biggest Stars5 min read
The Competition Nobody Expected Him to Win
He took voice acting classes. He trained. He treated it like the niche, punishing industry it actually is, because for a long stretch of his early career he was doing the work without fully knowing what he was doing. Say yes, then figure it out later — that was the move. He walked into sessions doing a deep character voice, got asked if he could hold it for four hours, said absolutely, then spent the next four hours clinging to the voice like a man on a rope bridge.
In 2014, Bang Zoom! Entertainment — one of the main anime dubbing houses in Los Angeles — ran a voice acting competition. Aguilar entered. He won. And the door swung open.
Small roles came first. Sword Art Online. Aldnoah.Zero. Early career work that built the muscle without the spotlight. Then One-Punch Man happened.
Three Callbacks and a Voice That Kept Changing
He already knew the webcomic. When he heard One-Punch Man was getting an English dub, his first thought was that getting an audition would itself be insane, never mind landing anything. He auditioned for three roles — Genos, Mumen Rider, Speed-o’-Sound Sonic — and told himself he’d be thrilled with any of them. He was lying to himself. He wanted Genos.
“I was thinking of every voice actor I was a fan of, and I thought, there’s no way I have a chance.”
He got a callback. Then another. Then another. Three or four total — an enormous number for an anime dub. He went in, recorded Genos’s lines to picture, waited, got notes from the Japanese production side saying they liked him but wanted adjustments, made the adjustments, waited again. Then, on the first actual recording day, the producer asked him to scrap everything he’d done across all the callbacks and go much deeper.
He did it. He held that lower register for an entire season. Which is why, when Season 2 came out sounding different — closer to what he’d done in the callbacks — he could tell confused fans with total calm: “Yeah. That was intentional.”