Tomorrow marks the U.S. theatrical premiere of Hayao Miyazaki’s latest animated feature, The Boy and the Heron, and there’s likely no one more excited for the movie to see the light of the day than Robert Pattinson.
Pattinson, best known for his leading roles in popular franchises like Twilight and The Batman, is making his voice acting debut in the upcoming film. His character, whose voice is characterized by a low-throated rumble, leads a young boy named Mahito on a journey to find his deceased mother in a magical realm where the living can interact with the dead.
“When Pattinson’s name came up,” voice director Michael Sinterniklaas told IndieWire, “I thought he’s a fine actor but there was nothing in his body of work to indicate that he could do this crazy thing.”
But from Pattinson’s very first recording session, it was clear he meant business, Sinterniklaas explained. The Lighthouse actor entered the studio with an impressive archive of voice samples he had brainstormed in his free-time.
“When he came to our studio in L.A.,” Sinterniklaas continued, “he was like, ‘OK, I’ve been thinking about this role and I recorded some stuff. Do you want to hear it?’ And he whips out his iPhone and plays some stuff that he’s just been doing in the Memos app and it was already the voice. I was like, ‘Oh, bingo, you’ve already got the character.’”
“Your mother, she’s awaiting your rescue. I’ll be your guide,” Pattinson growls in the official English-dubbed trailer. The British actor also puts on an American accent for The Boy and the Heron which, all in all, makes him sound totally unrecognizable.
Ahead of the film’s North American release, IndieWire also talked with GKIDS president Dave Jesteadt about how the distributor pulled off securing a star-studded lineup of voice actors that includes Pattinson, Christian Bale, Dave Bautista, Gemma Chan, Willem Dafoe, Karen Fukuhara, Mark Hamill and Florence Pugh.
“[Studio Ghibli] told us that casting was a really important aspect in regards to how they conceive this movie as being a love letter to the studio, and as perhaps the final Miyazaki film, that there would effectively be cameos from people that audiences might recognize as voice actors from previous films,” Jesteadt said.
Takuya Kimura, the actor who played Howl in Howl’s Moving Castle, will lead the voice cast as Mahito’s father, Shoichi Maki, in the Japanese version of the film. Likewise, Bale, who played Howl for the English dub of Howl’s Moving Castle, will play Shoichi Maki in the English-dubbed version of The Boy and the Heron.
Dafoe is also no stranger to Studio Ghibli, having voiced Lord Cob in Goro Miyazaki’s Tales from Earthsea. Hamill, too, had his first introduction to the animation studio with 1991’s “Castle in the Sky.
Jesteadt admitted that, more than ever before, the pressure is at an all-time high for GKIDS to do justice to Miyazaki’s “last” film. But landing big names that would accomplish this feat was far easier than expected; as it turned out, Jesteadt found that there’s plenty of A-list actors with Ghibli obsessions of their own.
“We’ve had a lot of communication with agents for years where they said, ‘I just want you to know that if another Hayao Miyazaki movie comes through, please give me a call before you talk to anyone else,’” Jesteadt told IndieWire. “So we had a pretty big arsenal of people who we knew were Ghibli fans, and might bring that energy into the performance.”
Fukuhara had publicly expressed interest in playing a role in a Miyazaki film for a while before finally getting the call she’d landed the part of Lady Himi in The Boy and the Heron. Appropriately enough, the Suicide Squad and The Boys actor was getting ready to go to a Joe Hisaishi concert when she heard the news.
“So ecstatic about this one I can barely type,” Fukuhara posted on Instagram after the English voiceover cast went public. “What a dream come true!”
Fukuhara, who previously worked with Sinterniklaas on Star Wars: Visions, is the only native Japanese speaker among the entire English cast, highlighting the precarious balance that GKIDS is straddling between preserving the film’s Japanese roots and adapting the story for an English audience.
“My personal north star for every dub is to give the same experience to a non-native audience,” Sinterniklaas said. “So it’s really about serving the original intent, but doing so in a way that feels immediate and personal and not painted by numbers.”
The Boy and the Heron hits U.S. theaters on Dec. 8. The movie was already released in Japan July 14.
