Jouji Nakata

Jouji Nakata is an actor, born 1954.

The oldest credit in this catalogue is a live-action one: Great Professor Bias in the 1988 Super Sentai series Choujuu Sentai Liveman. Almost everything in the thirty-odd years since has been voice work, and there is an enormous amount of it. Nakata, sometimes anglicised as George Nakata, is a Tokyo actor and narrator with the Office Osawa agency, and one of the most recognisable male voices in the medium.

The instrument is a low, unhurried, faintly amused baritone, and it is almost never cast as a hero. Alucard in Hellsing is the definitive use of it, a voice that treats appalling violence as a mild social occasion and drops half an octave when it becomes genuinely interested. Kirei Kotomine in the Fate series is the same quality applied to a priest: calm, courteous, entirely wrong on the inside. He has now played that character across three series and a film trilogy without once raising his volume to make a point.

The comic counterweight is Nyanta in Log Horizon, all purr and good manners, which is the best evidence that the menace is a choice rather than a limit. Elsewhere it is fathers, directors, bureaucrats and warlords: Soichiro Takagi in High School of the Dead, Diethard in Code Geass, Lord Bougainvillea in Violet Evergarden, Naobito Zen'in in Jujutsu Kaisen, Master Kongo in Land of the Lustrous, the title role in Gankutsuou.

He is also one of the most heavily used voices in Japanese video games, including Albert Wesker in Resident Evil and Sol Badguy in Guilty Gear, an entire second career this catalogue does not track.

Movies (72)

Where to start with Jouji Nakata

Start at Hellsing Ultimate, not the 2001 series. The earlier version is the rougher, more compressed one; the OVA adaptation gives Alucard the material his voice deserves, and Nakata's work there is why a lot of people learned his name in the first place.

Fate/Zero is the other pillar and the better show. Kirei Kotomine is a harder assignment than Alucard, a man whose central problem is that he cannot locate his own feelings, and Nakata delivers him almost entirely in flat courteous statements. For range instead, Log Horizon is a completely different animal and genuinely charming. The Vision of Escaflowne is the 1990s credit worth digging out, Black Lagoon and Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion are the mid-2000s ensemble work, and JUJUTSU KAISEN is where a much younger audience found him.

Alucard and the villains

The register the industry built around him. Alucard in Hellsing is the performance he will be remembered for, a vampire who is bored of being unkillable, and Black Lagoon uses the same dryness for a different kind of menace.

The Fate franchise

Kirei Kotomine across a decade of series and films, a priest whose entire character is a withheld explanation. Fate/Zero is where it works best, because that show gives him someone to explain himself to.

The rest

The wider catalogue, where the voice gets used for narration as much as for characters. Serial Experiments Lain is the strangest thing here, and Escaflowne is the early one that established the range.

Genres Jouji Nakata works in

More about Jouji Nakata

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