In ‘One Piece’, young Monkey D. Luffy (Iñaki Godoy) searches for the legendary treasure of the title and becomes king of the pirates. However, the path there is rocky and full of all kinds of dangers. Luffy and his crew repeatedly get involved in fights or are tested in some other way.
This is also quite strenuous during filming, as Luffy actor Iñaki Godoy shows in a video the example of underwater filming made it clear: “When I filmed underwater, it was pretty wild,” Godoy said in the interview. “I opened my eyes and there were divers with cameras filming me. And I had to act. Underwater! That was something new. The underwater scene was quite physically demanding because the water was freezing.”
But while this shoot was particularly strenuous, the 20-year-old found a completely different scene even more difficult, but for a completely different reason…
The scene where Godoy wanted to prove himself as Luffy
“The hardest scene for me… I had this one scene with Corby in a dinghy, where we were talking about dreams and about wanting to join the Navy. It was one of the first scenes I filmed. […] It was a very important scene because Luffy is all about dreams. So I knew I had to get this scene right. It’s about what that character stands for.”
So it wasn’t a spectacular action scene, but rather a quieter dialogue scene that caused Iñaki Godoy the most trouble – and that makes sense based on his explanation. It was precisely this scene that showed, not least to the many fans of the manga and its popular anime adaptation, whether Godoy was really suitable for Luffy.
However unremarkable the scene may initially seem, it is essential to introduce the character of Luffy and his entire being right at the beginning of the series (shortly after he frees Corby from the clutches of the sadistic pirate Alvida). For Godoy it was important and therefore particularly challenging to get to the core of the character with his quirks and different facets before going on an adventure with him.
“He is very friendly and nice. But he’s not just a bundle of energy. He is a bundle of energy who listens.”, the young star said in an interview with Teen Vogue. To achieve exactly that, he worked with director Marc Jobst on site for a long time, repeatedly changing things along the way.
And with success, as the overwhelmingly positive response to Godoy’s portrayal of Luffy and the series as a whole now shows – even if ‘One Piece’ recently suffered a setback in terms of ratings: