Daisuke Namikawa

Daisuke Namikawa was born in Tokyo in 1976 and began acting as a child, which is unusual in Japanese voice work and audible in the technique: he was a performer before he was a voice. He is associated with the agency Stay Luck and also works as a singer. He is also, persistently, confused with Daisuke Hirakawa, whose name differs from his by a single kanji.

The standard description of him, including the one on his own Wikipedia page, is that he plays young, kind heroes. Look at what he has actually been cast as over the last fifteen years and that description falls apart. Hisoka in Hunter x Hunter, a giggling sadist whose voice keeps sliding up into pleasure at the wrong moments. Kishou Arima in Tokyo Ghoul, who barely inflects at all. Jack the Ripper in Black Clover. Choso in Jujutsu Kaisen. The kind-hero roles are real, and Gilbert in Violet Evergarden and Rock in Black Lagoon are exactly that, but the parts that stuck are the unsettling ones.

What he is genuinely rare at is calm menace. Most voice actors signal a villain by dropping into a growl. Namikawa keeps the pleasant register and lets the content of the line do the work, so the character sounds reasonable and is not.

The catalogue is enormous, past two hundred and fifty credits, and it includes both halves of one character across two series: the young magus of Fate/Zero and the same man grown into Lord El-Melloi II in Unlimited Blade Works.