Naruto English Dub: Every Voice Actor Behind the Cast

The English version of Naruto was not recorded in Texas. It was made in Los Angeles, at Studiopolis, a post-production house based in Studio City, by a troupe of performers whose names rarely reach the general public. That point of geography explains a good part of what an English-speaking viewer hears on screen: the size of the cast, the way secondary roles are shared out, the color of certain performances. Two decades after the first sessions, the same core of actors is still at the microphone.

The same studio for twenty years is the first thing that sets this dub apart. Studiopolis is credited on the original series, on Naruto Shippuden and on Boruto: Naruto Next Generations, on the films, and on the Ultimate Ninja Storm games. Across seven hundred and twenty television episodes for the first two series, the work never passed from one company to another. On a production of that length, a performer hired at the start usually stays to the end, and often carries several characters rather than one.

A second trait of this dub: the director is also in the cast. Mary Elizabeth McGlynn is credited as ADR director on the original series and on Shippuden, and voices Kurenai Yuhi at the same time. Liam O'Brien signs the ADR scripts and part of the voice direction on Shippuden while playing Gaara. Kirk Thornton is credited as an episodic ADR director on the original series and voices Kisame Hoshigaki, then Shukaku. The two jobs are held by the same people from one series to the next.

The vocabulary itself was not invented in the booth. It comes from the manga published by Viz Media, the company that also holds the North American license for the three animated series. The English names of the characters, the techniques and the institutions of the Hidden Leaf Village belong to that edition as much as to the dub itself.

Then there is the scale of the job. Seven hundred and twenty episodes for the first two series, eleven feature films, then a sequel series carried in English up to episode 293: very few English dubs run that long with so little turnover. The result is closer to a feat of endurance. A small core of performers, one recording studio, two decades of sessions, and a vocal continuity that very few long series manage to hold from end to end.

That continuity has a direct effect on listening. Anyone picking the series up at a late episode recognizes at once the voices heard when the show began. Where other long franchises pile up recasts, the English version of Naruto behaves like a repertory company: the same actors, in the same roles, aging alongside their characters. That is rare, and you can hear it.

For the second series, nothing moves. The five hundred episodes of Naruto Shippuden are recorded at Studiopolis, the Los Angeles studio credited with ADR production on the show. Jamie Simone is ADR director and producer, and casting director as well; Mary Elizabeth McGlynn directs alongside him, as she had on the original series; Liam O'Brien writes ADR scripts and takes part of the voice direction. All five hundred episodes were dubbed into English, and the American broadcast alone ran from January 2014 to September 2024.

The first series had settled a cast of children; Shippuden asks for something else. The characters have grown, the story turns political, and the gallery of antagonists widens. The Akatsuki alone brings in a dozen new voices, and each of its members is given an actor of his own. Where the English dub doubles up is everywhere else: the same handful of names comes back on the toads, the tailed beasts and the reanimated dead, and an actor can end up answering himself inside a single scene.

Direction is shared on this stretch of the franchise. Jamie Simone is credited as ADR director and producer, and as casting director; Mary Elizabeth McGlynn directs as well, having already done so on the original series and on the films; Liam O'Brien signs ADR scripts and part of the voice direction. Several of them are also in the cast, which adds up to a long list of characters: Mary Elizabeth McGlynn is Kurenai Yuhi, Mei Terumi, Katsuyu and Koharu Utatane, and Liam O'Brien is Gaara. Directing and playing on the same show is ordinary in this troupe.

The rest of the cast divides the story into blocks. The young ninja keep the voices given to them in the original series, the mentors and the Kage go to the most experienced members of the troupe, and the one-off figures go to reinforcements brought in for a few episodes. The continuity holds, including through the densest arcs, where thirty characters can speak inside a single episode. Nothing in the credits suggests the core was ever rebuilt: the voices heard in 2005 are still the voices heard at the end of Shippuden.

Shippuden is also where the English dub takes on its longest stretches of dialogue. Itachi's monologues, Kabuto Yakushi's explanations, Obito's accounts of the war: Kishimoto lets his characters talk for whole episodes at a time. Writing of that kind puts the voice direction under strain, because attention has to be held with nothing happening on screen. The most experienced actors are placed there as a matter of course, which explains a distribution of parts that looks lopsided on paper.

Across the 720 episodes of Naruto and Naruto: Shippuden, recorded in English over nearly twenty years, a few handovers were unavoidable. What stands out in this dub is instead their rarity: the core of the cast barely moved, and the permanent replacements can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Here are the cases a careful ear ends up spotting.

One pattern emerges from the list. In English, a change of performer is rarely left vague: it is written into the credits episode by episode, which is why most of these handovers can be placed exactly where they happened rather than somewhere in a season.

The English names heard in the series are not inventions of the recording studio. They come from the official English wording of the franchise, settled by Viz Media, which holds the North American license and puts out the dub and the home video sets that go with it. By the time a performer opens a script, the vocabulary is already fixed, and the same terms turn up in the episode titles, on the box sets and in Viz's own editorial copy. That is why a name heard on screen matches what is printed on the packaging, and why it can differ from the transliteration a viewer first met elsewhere.

The most visible case is the fox sealed inside Naruto. In English he is the Nine-Tails, sometimes the Nine-Tailed Fox, where the Japanese says Kyubi. The choice is a deliberate one: the number of tails is the piece of information an English-speaking viewer can use straight away, and it carries over to the whole set, from the One-Tail to the Eight-Tails. The Japanese form survives only as an oddity, in a single official episode title that still reads Naruto VS The Kyuubi.

The same logic applies to the village. Where the Japanese says Konohagakure, the English says the Hidden Leaf, or the Hidden Leaf Village, or simply the Leaf, depending on the line. The other hidden villages get the same treatment, on the pattern Village Hidden in the Sand or Village Hidden Among the Stones: the element is translated, the shape of the name is not.

One detail was never settled, though: the long vowels. Japanese marks them with a macron, and the English editions disagree on whether to keep it. The same rank is printed Chunin in one place and Chūnin in another, the same eye Mangekyo Sharingan or Mangekyō Sharingan. The word is identical, the spelling is not, which is why anyone writing about the franchise in English has to pick a convention and hold it to the end.

The unevenness goes beyond spelling: on one word it creates two parallel vocabularies for the same episodes. One English listing gives Byakugan vs. Shadow Clone Jutsu! where another gives Byakugan vs. Shadow Clone Technique!, and a Shippuden episode is Sealing Jutsu: Nine Phantom Dragons on one side, Sealing Technique: Phantom Dragons Nine Consuming Seals on the other. Jutsu and Technique alternate from one list to the next, and which list belongs to which edition, broadcast dub, subtitles or later reissue, is not something a viewer can settle from the outside.

What did hold, all the same, is the core of the vocabulary. Across three series, the 720 episodes of Naruto and Shippuden alone, eleven theatrical films and the Ultimate Ninja Storm games, the words that matter did not move: chakra and jutsu stayed Japanese, the Nine-Tails and the Hidden Leaf stayed English, Hokage and jinchuriki were never translated, Sage Mode and the Curse Mark were never left in Japanese. The variations sit at the edges, a macron here, a jutsu turned Technique in a listing there, and never at the centre. That is what lets a viewer go from a 2005 episode to a Boruto box set without relearning a single name.