Brandon McInnis' Black Clover Performance Is Deeply Informed By The Original Japanese Version
Yūki Tabata's "Black Clover" manga arrived in February of 2015, and in the years since, it has become quite a popular title. In fact, it's so popular that it has become the basis for an anime adaptation, which hit the small screen for the first time in 2017 and proved just as appreciated as the source material. After all, it followed the story of the manga as close as it possibly could, given the fact that they're vastly different mediums, and brought fan-favorite characters to life in a way that print simply can't.
Much like the "Black Clover" manga, the "Black Clover" anime (which is about to be succeeded by a movie, "Black Clover: Sword of the Wizard King") centers on Asta (Dallas Reid): a boy who's dealt a bad hand in life seeing as he has no magical powers in a world where having them is the norm. Despite this, he finds other means of becoming a powerful entity and coming closer to his ultimate goal of taking the title of Wizard King. Along the way, he encounters numerous other friends, foes, and people who fall somewhere in between. One such individual Asta runs into is Finral Roulacase.
A member of the Black Bulls, Finral gets plenty of time to shine on "Black Clover," allowing voice actor Brandon McInnis of "My Hero Academia" fame the chance to do what he does best. Although, Finral's Japanese voice actor, Jun Fukuyama, has greatly influenced his approach to the role.
McInnis is guided by Fukuyama's vocal performances
In June of 2022, Brandon McInnis took some time to speak with Fandom Spotlite about his voice acting work on the English dub of "Black Clover." As he revealed during the interview, his vocal performances aren't entirely his own since he's able to hear how Jun Fukuyama approached Finral's lines in Japanese and use that audio as a guide. "I hear the performance in the Japanese as I'm watching the flaps to kind of, like, clock it before we come in for a pass in English...it kind of informs my performance in English," he said, noting that he even picks up on translation errors between the two due to his fluency in Japanese.
Even though he's taken some performative cues from Jun Fukuyama's take on Finral, that's not to say that Brandon McInnis hasn't tried to make the role his own. After all, as he explained in a chat with the Anime Herald, voice acting is all about making the character a part of yourself. "As actors, we go into the booth, and we sort of develop these characters, we understand them, we become them," McInnis told the publication. He goes on to express his amazement at the fan response to most of his voice roles, which has proven overwhelmingly positive as he's visited various conventions.
The key to any form of performance is making a character all your own, but there's no shame in looking to others for inspiration. That's exactly what Brandon McInnis has done as he's brought the English version of Finral to life on "Black Clover."