Junichi Suwabe

Junichi Suwabe was born in Tokyo in 1972 and is affiliated with Haikyo. The whole career runs on one instrument: a low, slow, faintly amused voice that sounds like it is already several moves ahead and cannot be bothered to say so.

The two poles sit in two of the biggest series running. Ryomen Sukuna in Jujutsu Kaisen and Shota Aizawa in My Hero Academia are delivered at almost identical volume, unhurried and dismissive, and point in exactly opposite moral directions. That is the useful thing about him: he does not change the voice to signal which one you are dealing with, so the writing has to do the work, and the effect is far more interesting than the usual villain register. Archer in Fate/stay night, Grimmjow in Bleach, Yami Sukehiro in Black Clover, Aomine in Kuroko's Basketball, Leone Abbacchio in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Undertaker in Black Butler and Greed in the 2003 Fullmetal Alchemist are all cut from that cloth.

The exception, and the reason he has the audience he has, is Victor Nikiforov in Yuri on Ice, who is warm, silly and completely unguarded. It is the same voice with the armour off. He also works constantly in games, including Omega Zero in Mega Man Zero 3 and Sentinel Prime for Transformers, and the credit count runs past two hundred and fifty, which means he turns up in almost every large series of the last twenty years, often in a role you did not realise was him.