Kenyu Horiuchi

Horiuchi, born in Gotemba in 1957, has two careers running in parallel. One is anime, where this catalogue alone holds more than 170 credits. The other is dubbing, where he is the standing Japanese voice of Brad Pitt, whom he finally met at the Japanese premiere of Bullet Train, along with Charlie Sheen, Ben Stiller, Ben Affleck, Brendan Fraser and John Stamos, the last of those as Jesse Katsopolis in Full House. Japanese dub work is a career in itself and he has one of the biggest.

The instrument is a low, unhurried voice with a smile somewhere inside it, and the roles that use it best are men who never raise their volume because they have never needed to. Pain in Naruto Shippuden is delivered as doctrine rather than threat, which is what makes it frightening. Wilhelm van Astrea in Re:ZERO carries decades of grief under a soldier's flat courtesy. En in Dorohedoro is a crime boss who sounds bored. Gren in Cowboy Bebop, a single-arc role in a series full of them, is quiet and wounded and lands the whole character inside a single two-part story.

He set up his own management office, Kenyu Office, in 2002. The range is wider than the type suggests: Kinemon in One Piece is comic bluster, Dr. Franxx in DARLING in the FRANXX is a cackling grotesque, and he also narrates Pokemon, which means a generation has heard him without ever knowing his name.