NEED TO KNOW
Aleks Le knows how to “preserve” his voice for intense studio sessions — and he’s giving anime fans the inside scoop.
The 26-year-old voice actor, who notably has lent his talents to Sung Jinwoo in Solo Leveling and Zenitsu Agatsuma in Demon Slayer, caught up with The Wrap this week to break down his approach and how he manages to keep his recognizable voice intact despite the “intense yelling lines” that occasionally come with the job.
“The best thing you can do to protect yourself is to ask the production people to break your sessions up into two-hour chunks or just reallocate certain very intense yelling lines to the end of the session so that you could at least preserve most of your voice in the beginning,” Le, who provides the English dub voices for both characters, told the outlet in a recent interview.
“But honestly, there are safe ways to scream and there are also times where you can’t safely scream,” he added. “So it really just depends on how you pace yourself, what you prioritize in your own personal performance and how much you know about your own voice and if you know enough to protect it.”
Crunchyroll
Le, whose voice can also be heard behind Ne Zha’s Ao Bing, is earning plenty of acclaim for his work in recent months. At the 5th Astra TV Awards back in May, he scored the award for Best Lead Voice-Over Performance thanks to his Solo Leveling season 2 performance, marking a major milestone for both himself and the A-1 Pictures series.
At the time, the Vietnam-born Le shared during an acceptance speech that he picked up English as a kid after he moved to the U.S. at age 10, and that snagging an acting award was “the most surreal thing that could happen to someone like me.”
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And while he’s already made his voice known, he still has a few dream roles he’s hoping to take on, as he told The Wrap. “My favorite manga of all time is called Real and my second favorite manga is called Vagabond — both by the same author, Takehiko Inoue, who wrote and drew Slam Dunk,” he said of his two favorite series, which debuted in 1999 and 1998, respectively.
“If they ever adapted those, I would love to play the leads in them, but for the most part, in terms of anime, that’s kind of the only dream project I really have left in my head,” Le added. “I feel that I’ve already done all I wanted to do with anime.”
In terms of where he envisions himself in other mediums, Le revealed that he’d like to be “a part of something new that’s never been heard of” before. “To originate an IP and be a part of the process from the very beginning is something I’ve always wanted to do. So that’s kind of what I’m aiming to do in the future,” he added.
As for now, fans can continue hearing Le’s voice on Solo Leveling, which is based on Chugong and DUBU’s web novel and webtoon and follows Le’s character of Sung Jinwoo (the “world’s weakest hunter”) as he’s “chosen by the mysterious ‘system’” after barely surviving a deadly dungeon raid,” per a synopsis from Crunchyroll. The system “allows him to level up beyond human limits, turning him from prey to predator as he uncovers the dark truth behind the monster-infested dungeons,” per the synopsis.
The series, which debuted its second season back in January, currently has 25 episodes available to stream.
