Mamoru Miyano

Mamoru Miyano is an actor, born 1983.

Mamoru Miyano, born in Saitama in 1983, is a Japanese voice actor and singer with a catalogue that runs to hundreds of roles. The recognition came fast: a Best Lead Actor nomination at the first Seiyu Awards in 2007 for Light Yagami in Death Note, then the win at the second in 2008 for Setsuna F. Seiei in Mobile Suit Gundam 00, plus Best Voice Actor at that year's Tokyo International Anime Fair. He has run a parallel music career the whole time, with the single Kuon in 2007 and the album Break in 2009, and he works on stage as well.

His signature is charm with something wrong underneath. Light Yagami is the template: a voice that sounds like the polite, brilliant head boy, capable of sliding into something operatic without ever losing its poise. The same instrument gets reused across a gallery of handsome monsters, including Shuu Tsukiyama in Tokyo Ghoul, who treats appetite as connoisseurship, Chrollo in Hunter x Hunter, Sweet Mask in One-Punch Man, and Doma in the Demon Slayer films. What separates him from other actors with a good villain voice is that he plays the courtesy sincerely. The menace comes from how genuinely pleasant he sounds.

The other half is comedy, and it is the half that makes the villains work. Rintaro Okabe in Steins;Gate is a mad-scientist performance delivered by a man who cannot sustain the act, and Miyano plays the bravado and the cracks in it as the same sound. Ling Yao in Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood is broad and greedy and then abruptly serious. Atsumu Miya in Haikyu is pure needling arrogance. Between those poles sit the ordinary leading-man parts, from Gilthunder in The Seven Deadly Sins to teenage Ichirohiko in The Boy and the Beast.

Movies (96)

Where to start with Mamoru Miyano

Go straight to Death Note. Half the series is two people thinking at each other, which means the whole thing rests on line readings, and the reason Light became the defining anime antagonist of his generation is largely in Miyano's voice.

Then switch registers with Steins;Gate. Okabe is loud, ridiculous and eventually devastating, and hearing the same actor build a comic persona and then dismantle it is the best case for his range. Tokyo Ghoul is the fun one, an aesthete villain performed at absurd volume, and One-Punch Man gives you a compact version of the same act. For the warmer side, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood and Haikyu!! both use him as a scene-stealer rather than a threat. If you want a film, The Boy and the Beast is the one worth an evening.

The star-making roles

Light Yagami in Death Note is the performance that made him, and it works because the voice is doing two things at once for most of the run. Steins;Gate asks for the opposite: a man who is performing constantly and is very bad at it.

The long-running shonen series

The steady work in the very large series. He is usually cast slightly against the ensemble, as the one with more polish than everyone around him, and Haikyu and Assassination Classroom both use that deliberately.

The films

The Mamoru Hosoda films are the best of these: The Boy and the Beast and Belle both give him more room than a series episode ever does. Sword of the Stranger is the older one and the most beautifully animated thing on the list.

Genres Mamoru Miyano works in

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