Colleen Clinkenbeard voices Monkey D. Luffy, the captain of the Straw Hat Pirates and lead of the anime series One Piece. The show initially began airing in the U.S. in 2004, under a license with 4Kids. In 2007, Funimation licensed the series and redubbed the beginning, and has since been the home of One Piece. Clinkenbeard has voiced Luffy in every episode of Funimation's dub.
Voice actress Colleen Clinkenbeard sat down with Screen Rant to discuss the upcoming 1000th episode of One Piece, the process behind his voice, and the series' fourteen-year journey.
Screen Rant: How did you get involved with One Piece?
Colleen Clinkenbeard: I auditioned. I had been working at Funimation for just a little bit and I had recently kind of come up with a boy voice for a different project - which was my first real boy voice. And when auditions were being held for One Piece, Mike McFarland called me in and I thought I'd be auditioning for Nami and Robin. So that's what I came in focusing on and he asked me in the moment to audition for Luffy and got my blood up immediately.
Thankfully he let me go away and work on it - and then come back and read it, cause I had no idea that's what I would be reading for. And then he cast me. He sent that off to Toei and they actually came back with notes for everybody on what they'd like to hear slightly different and then we did another round. They had asked that Luffy be a little bit gruffer, so I gruffed him up a little bit. Then here we are.
How'd you come up with Luffy's voice, besides it being gruffer?
Colleen Clinkenbeard: The standard boy voice for women voicing boys in our American media is to kind of throw it into the back of your throat and gruff it up a little bit. I learned that straight from Laura Bailey, who was my roommate and best friend, and she kind of got me in the door. She's the one who taught me how to do different things like that, because otherwise, everything would sound like Meatwad.
I had no idea what to do with voices. So I kind of took that and then made it my own. Then Luffy is a little bit gruffer than my standard boy voice - so maybe a little more cartoony? That's kind of the transformation. And he's changed over the years too! There's a time skip and we kind of lowered it and made sure that he sounded a little bit older. He goes through a lot of transformations.
Speaking of transformations, Luffy has his different gears. What has been your approach to differentiating between the different gears?
Colleen Clinkenbeard: Straight fear. Every time a new gear is introduced, it's like, really?! I don't have any more gears left in me. So it's just fear feeding it, and then really, honestly, you're just trying to push it to the next level - and it feels like you've already pushed it as far as it possibly could go. Thankfully with the latest one there was an actual vocal shift that happened that's like a character that's being put on in the original. So that kind of guided us to a different voice for this latest gear, but other than that it's just go as big and as loud and as gruff as you can.
I was wondering, knowing that you're in the 700 hundred range and you'll be hitting the 1,000 mark range, what do you think will help you maybe lessen burnout going forward with him?
Colleen Clinkenbeard: I definitely have vocal burnout, where I hit a place where I just can't Luffy anymore that day - but burnout with the character and the longevity of the show has never been a problem for me because it's always been so interesting. There's no thread that is left untethered in this show. It always picks up with the next arc and you always are interested in the next villain and finding out what the crew is doing next. They keep it interesting, always.
So I experience no burnout with Luffy, I'm never tired of him. In fact, when he goes away for a while - for whatever reason - whenever he comes back I'm so excited and I can't wait to get in the booth. Even knowing the pain that I'm going to go through, it's still so worth it. So approaching the thousandth episode I'm less afraid of burnout and more afraid of: I'm going to be really sad when it's over.
Speaking of a thousand episodes, you're also voicing characters that have been on Dragon Ball. How does it feel to have a legacy that spans two of the most successful long-term franchises in anime and manga?
Colleen Clinkenbeard: Well it's interesting because I came into the Dragon Ball universe after the fact, you know? When I got to Funimation, Dragon Ball was already a thing. Those characters were already in place - and then when it came back around in a different iteration with Dragon Ball Z Kai, that's when I got to be a part of the show and I was so thrilled to get to be a part of something that was THAT huge. It's this tentpole show for our company and I was really sad that I wasn't going to be a part of it. So that made me very happy.
But with One Piece it's a different thing because I've gotten to be there from the ground up for Funimation. Now, to be fair it's been dubbed before. There are other iterations of it, but we went back and we started at episode one, so we genuinely have gone through the entire series with me as the voice of Luffy. So I feel that sense of pride and not ownership, but definitely a connection to Luffy that you rarely get - because you're rarely with a character for that long and from the beginning. So Luffy's pretty special to me.
You mentioned the previous dub and we talked about your process with the voice. Was there anything about the previous dub that you looked into when you were doing your version of the character or was it completely new and yours?
Colleen Clinkenbeard: I actually have never heard the previous dub, deliberately. I didn't want that to inform the way that I did the voice and I think when we first started out that was the direction we were going. It was a whole new approach to it. So we specifically weren't supposed to look into it, so I just never have. I've never heard the previous one and maybe I'll go back someday, but for the moment this is where I'm living.
For viewers that haven't joined the Straw Hat crew yet, because they're young or because they may be daunted by the size and where we are in the series - what would you say to them about why they should join the crew?
Colleen Clinkenbeard: I think people get really daunted by how many episodes there are in One Piece and it can feel like a really big thing to bite off. But what people forget is that all you have to do is enjoy the episode that you're watching right then. You don't have to speed through it. You don't have to try to get through it. The point is to be enjoying it as it's happening, so I think that wherever you are, whenever you start it, just enjoy the journey from that episode. Don't make it a race and don't get too precious about spoilers or about catching up in the manga or not catching up in the manga or how you're supposed to engage with it.
Just enjoy it and then you get to experience it fully rather than cramming it into the crannies of your media watching. That, to me, it's great to be in a place where you're at the beginning of a show like this because then you have so much to look forward to.
My final question for you is - we talked a lot about the boy voices and how you approached them - what is it like being a woman who gets to voice this iconic boy character?
Colleen Clinkenbeard: I'm really, really grateful for the opportunity because to be honest, it's very difficult to find a show that is as popular as One Piece that has a female lead. The chances of my getting to voice a role as iconic as this were slim because I am a woman and because a lot of the iconic voices are male characters. So, the fact that I get to voice it because they needed a woman in that role was really lucky! I'll be forever grateful for it, but I am always looking for that to shift in our media experience.
The 1000th episode of One Piece airs on Saturday, November 20 at 9 PM EST on Funimation and Crunchyroll.