The Netflix boss acknowledged that selecting the right actor to portray Luffy in One Piece presented one of the most arduous casting challenges they have ever faced.

Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos puts the casting of One Piece‘s Luffy (played by Iñaki Godoy) among the most difficult jobs in the company’s history, putting him side-by-side with notoriously tough jobs like Walter Scobell’s young Ryan Reynolds from The Adam Project or Kirby Howell-Baptiste’s Death in The Sandman.

Sarandos revealed at Netflix’s Q3 2023 earnings interview that One Piece went #1 in 84 countries, which was “something Stranger Things couldn’t do, that Wednesday couldn’t do,” before identifying a core reason for this in Luffy’s casting. “Iñaki Godoy, who stars in the show, it was — one of the most difficult casting challenges in the history of our original programming was who’s gonna play Monkey D. Luffy,” Sarandos said.

“And he was right under our nose, right in our talent family,” he adds. “We discovered him a couple of years ago and had him in this great show in our Mexican series called Who Killed Sara?, and then we were able to cast him in this, and now he’s a global superstar. So this is that kind of thing you could do well, a thing that’s hard to copy and gives us kind of competitive running room from our competitors, being able to do that more and more.”

The casting team considered 100s of actors to play Luffy with none quite having the perfect mix of “heart, warmth, and chemistry” needed to make the audience “fall in love with these characters,” according to One Piece director Marc Jobst. Godoy had exactly that, proving it by doing “something crazy, and off-script, very deliberately, and it was like, ‘Oh, okay, he’s got some cheek and some charm, and some chutzpah to him,'” Jobst added. Godoy was personally endorsed by One Piece creator Eiichiro Oda and the anime’s Japanese voice actor Mayumi Tanaka. Oda said that he “can’t imagine anyone else playing him.”

Dr. Kureha Will Be Much Easier to Cast

An actor who’ll be easy to cast for One Piece‘s upcoming season 2 is the role of Dr. Kureha. Jamie Lee Curtis has been very vocal that she is a huge fan of the series, and her bid has been recognized by showrunner Matt Owens. “We have to try and get her [Curtis] on the show,” Owens says. “What can we do? And Dr. Kureha, very luckily, is a character who is coming up in our story, and is someone who is perfect for Jamie Lee Curtis.”

Netflix describes the One Piece live-action series: “With his straw hat and ragtag crew, young pirate Monkey D. Luffy goes on an epic voyage for treasure in this live-action adaptation of the popular manga.”