The Boy and the Heron voice director doubted Robert Pattinson’s casting

The English dub voice director for the anime film The Boy and the Heron doubted Robert Pattinson’s voice casting when it was first announced, but was quickly impressed by his performance.

When it comes to voice acting, it’s incredibly important to cast the right actors in the roles or else the movie can feel a bit off to audiences.

Some of the most high profile voice castings have gone either way with Super Mario fans not happy with Chris Pratt being cast as the titular plumber, but Offset fans being pleasantly surprised by the rapper’s appearance in the Baby Shark film.

So, it’s not surprising when The Boy and the Heron director was a bit doubtful upon hearing Robert Pattinson was cast in the role as The Grey Heron, but he was genuinely shocked when the actor stepped into the booth to record for the role.

Boy and the Heron praises Pattinson for flawless performance

Voice director Michael Sinterniklaas was initially doubtful concerning Pattinson’s involvement in The Boy and the Heron telling Indie Wire, “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.”

However, Pattinson quickly squashed any of Sinterniklaas’ fears as he was incredibly excited to take on the role and came over-prepared with his audition materials.

“When he came to our studio in L.A., he was like ‘OK, I’ve been thinking about this role and I recorded some stuff. Do you want to hear it?’” Sinterniklaas recalled, “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.” 

Despite this being Pattinson’s voice casting, his finished his filming in just two days and the crew had nothing but praise for him for his dubbing, especially GKIDS’ Director of Acquisitions and Development Rodney Uhler.

“He knew he could do it,” Uhler stated along with mentioning that GKIDS gave Pattinson the option to give the role up, but he threw himself into the role. “He showed up and delivered magic.”

In the meantime, you can check out our top 10 Studio Ghibli movies here, and our other anime coverage here.