Chainsaw Man is proving to be one of, if not the hottest anime on the block right now, scoring a fresh rating of 100% on Rotten Tomatoes and an average rating of 4.9/5 on Crunchyroll.
If you’re out of the loop, Chainsaw Man is a story about a young dude with a hard-knock life that makes friends with a chainsaw dog. A series of events transpire that result in him becoming Da Chainsaw Man, a man who can also become a chainsaw. I’m purposefully not giving too much away because I think you should watch it.
Chainsaw Man also comes to us in an era unheard of to many anime fans, and that’s one where a lot of anime coming out these days is incredibly well-dubbed. Gone are the days of 4Kids giving characters the most New York accent you’ve ever heard (although I do miss some of them), we are finally in a time where watching the dub over the sub is not that bad.
In saying that, the Chainsaw Man dub rocks. It’s genuinely very good. There are still plenty of shows that I’d definitely watch the sub over the dub, but this isn’t one of them. What a time to be alive.
I had the opportunity to sit down and have a chat with the leading ladies of the Chainsaw Man English dub cast, Suzie Yeung (Makima) and Sarah Wiedenheft (Power), to ask them all about their time on the show, how alike (or unalike) they are to the characters they play, how one disastrous world event turned into a career change, and how horrible some roommates can be.
If you’re looking for our interview with Ryan Colt Levy (Denji) and Reagan Murdock (Aki), you can head over here.
What has your experience been like working on such a long-desired anime like Chainsaw Man?
Suzie: It’s been crazy and it has not hit me still really like sunken in fully that I’m in Chainsaw Man. It’s been wild because just seeing all the excitement build around it you just kind of think, “Am I really a part of this? Is this real right now?” I haven’t actually recorded four episodes so far. It’s a dream.
Sarah: It does feel like it’s a fever dream. It’s still not quite sunk in and like all this love and overwhelming outpour of Chainsaw Man excitement I’m like, “What happened?”
Suzie: Yeah, because I think we just see online, we haven’t really jumped into the world where it’s like people, you know, so at least that’s my experience.
Yeah. Absolutely. And I mean, your roles as Makima and Power are so incredibly different with Makima being quite cool and collected and then Power being a bit of a wildcard. So how did you go about moulding yourself into these roles?
Suzie: I had to pull myself together. Because Makima is very in control of herself and I certainly was not during the first session. I think when I was delivering one of the lines, Mike was like, “Uh, this doesn’t sound very Makima like, your voice got very shaky.” I was like, “I know, my heart is beating so fast right now.” Like I was acting more like Kobani at that moment, I was just stuttering the whole time. So it feels like that pretty much every session at the very beginning, my heart starts racing a little bit because I’m like, “Okay, I have to put it away and just cool down because it’s Makima.”
Sarah: I was very excited. I read a bit of the manga to help myself understand the character more. And then noticing like, she’s very selfish, she’s a pathological liar. Like, you know, she’s also always correct no matter what happens and what the situation is so she’s like, constantly trying to get herself out of something or into something if it somehow manages to benefit her in some way. And so I just, I love how chaotic she is and ridiculous she is, but it like it completely depends on like, what the situation is turning into.
Do you guys identify with your characters at all? Are there any other characters in the series that you feel you’re more like? Sarah, I know that you love cats, and Power loves cats. So is that where the similarities end?
Sarah: I love every kind of cat. Yeah, I definitely feel that part. Like I’ve always loved cats since I was a little girl. I don’t know if that was influenced by Sailor Moon or if it just was a natural thing or not. But yeah. Other than that, a lot of her excitable gremlin energy, I feel that too. But I do flush and I do bathe as often as I can.
Suzie: I’m glad to hear that!
Great qualities to have in a person.
Sarah: Power would not agree.
And how about you, Suzie?
Suzie: Ah, well, I would say I would like to be more like Makima because she definitely exudes this sort of perfect… Like, she’s just perfect. Like, she’s flawless. And she is in complete control of herself. Nothing shakes her up. But I would say I’m maybe a bit more like Aki, in a sense, because he tries to be serious, and he’s trying to do his job, but he’s actually really insecure. And like, not sure about himself. So I think I relate a little bit more to him than Makima who’s just straight perfection and just knows what she’s doing all the time.
Suzie, your background isn’t actually in voice acting or entertainment, but rather in sociology and higher education, so I just wanted to ask what sparked your shift in career. Do you think your background in sociology helped you in your role of Makima, a character that can read people so clearly?
Suzie: Hmm. That’s interesting, cuz I don’t think I necessarily cognitively applied those concepts, but I think subconsciously I might have. But yeah, like, it was surprising because I did not foresee myself going into this field at all. Like it was only in 2020 that I actually started to pursue voiceover fully.
Sarah: The prime time too.
Suzie: Yeah, during COVID like, yeah, so yeah, it’s hard. I feel like timing and the universe are really strange in that sense.
Sarah: God, is that when Kemono Friends started? Was that during the pandemic?
Suzie: Ohh, no, it was a little bit before. But I was also working my job at that time. So I was flying back and forth. I wasn’t completely committed until literally 2020 when I moved to LA. I was still like, oh, I should keep this nine-to-five job in case things don’t work out. So you know, now I’m here.
I mean, look, things have worked out!
Suzie: Hopefully! I’m super grateful.
And Sarah, Power is, on all accounts, a terrible roommate. So have you ever had any experiences with bad roommates, akin to Power that you might have, thought about and thought, “I think I could reference this…”?
Sarah: I mean, like, living with roommates is always a hard thing. Because, you know, everybody grows up differently. And you have different definitions of clean, you have different ideas of like how fast you should do certain things. What’s the shared space like? So many different things. And so that can clash. I’ve lived with many different types of roommates.
Gosh, I think probably the worst one I’ve had was one recently, and it’s mostly because I was living in a place that was a community-type house and we discussed everything that we were going to be able to do beforehand. Like all the things that would be required of us, we wanted to always be involved in all the projects going on. Like if we’re going to be building something, we’d like all the roommates to be involved, we have a chore system so that we can disperse all these chores around because it’s a huge house and we make a lot of messes. So it’d be nice if everybody were involved.
Two people didn’t end up helping with a lot of the things and we constantly felt like we were doing things on our own. One person, in particular, was driving me insane because they left their frickin’ hair and globs everywhere in the bathroom. One thing about me is that I hate hair once it’s off of something and someone like I see it I’m like *gags*. They’d leave it in the shower, like all over the shower walls and the drain. And we would constantly be like “Hey, can we please take care of the hair all over the place?” And I’d have to ask so many times, both I and my other roommate had asked her many times and then at some point… Like she never got into her head that maybe like, “We should stop. We should stop doing that because they’re asking me multiple times, maybe I should start cleaning up after it.”
I got home from a convention and it was really late at night. I was so tired, and I went to go to the bathroom and I opened it up and I see in the sink a huge glob of hair just like running down the side of it. She had really long hair too. Just like huge, streaming down the side of it, and I look at it and I close the door and I go to my room and I text, “Can you please clean your hair in the sink? It really bothers me.” And she’s like, “Yes. I’m so sorry about that.” So I think about this and that’s one of the only few things that bothered me and
Suzie: If it was Power, she would not apologize.
Sarah: She would not.
She’d be like, “It’s supposed to be there.”
Suzie: Yeah, exactly.
Sarah: You’d be like “Can you clean up your hair?” and she’d look at you and leave. She would do the thing like if you ask her a question or ask her to clean something up after herself, she’d be looking like a deer in headlights, looking into the distance like she’s dissociating. Like you’re causing conflict with her right now and she cannot hear you. “I’m not here. If I don’t move, maybe she’ll go away.” Yeah, I like to think about that whenever she comes in for the roommate.
And you’ve both voice-acted in multiple video games. What are some of your favourite video games? And do you ever feel weird playing games that you hear your voice in?
Suzie: I’m a huge Final Fantasy fan.
Suzie: Thank you. Thank you. I was over the moon. That was actually the first role I auditioned for and booked in LA. So I was like, Oh my God. Yeah. So I was like, I love RPGs. I love Kingdom Hearts, like all the story-driven, character-driven narrative games. And yeah, it is a little weird at first hearing my voice but I try not to focus on it because I just love playing the game. And I love how the characters interact and everything. So yeah, that’s my jam.
Sarah: I also like to play games. I think some of my first things was that I was playing Animal Crossing for the longest time when I was younger, and a really funny, silly story is that I had the GameCube and I was playing that, and at the time when you bought the GameCube, it came with a free game along with it. And I hadn’t played it. After I played Animal Crossing for a long time, I needed to switch it up a little bit and I look over and saw the free game along with it, which was The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker. And I was like, “Oh, I love this.” And so that got me into wanting to do Twilight Princess and I was like, “Oh my god, I love this even more.”
I started playing the old Zelda games and that jumped me into wanting to play more story-driven games. I like those. Recently, I started playing Spiritfarer and I haven’t finished it because I know what’s going to happen and I don’t like it. I haven’t played too many games that have my voice in them just yet. There was one that was a horror game and I couldn’t play that by myself, I had to watch somebody playing it instead. I wouldn’t be able to. They made it so scary, it was Pulang Insanity, it’s one of those where the graphics are so bad and because it’s so bad it looks even scarier.
The English dub for Chainsaw Man is streaming now on Crunchyroll.
Leave a Reply