Interview Piece: J. Micheal Tatum (Part 1)

Back during OniCon, I was blessed to be in the presence of the voice of God. We had a marvelous time and had such an engaging conversation. The only way to describe our time together was....godly.

haha So here is the interview that I had with J. Micheal Tatum (Voice of Eneru, Dalton, and Pearl.) that was done while at OniCon 2010. We had such a long conversations talking about how dubbing works, our obsession with One Piece and so much more! Unfortunately this interview is so long that it is going to be cut up into two pieces so I hope you will enjoy the first piece of our conversations with the godly J. Micheal Tatum.

J. Michael Tatum: Hello! Hello! It is lovely to be here. Thank you. It is always nice to meet a One Piece fan.

MS: Yes. Always nice. Always nice to see them. This con has a good-

JMT: Yeah yeah. I am really impress so far. This is great. I love it. I love to see One Piece getting love.

MS: Yeah. I love it too. Makes me feel better. Seen any good (One Piece) cosplayers?

JMT: Umm…You know, I seen a bunch. I already seen three really fantastic Luffys and every time that I do I go into like fight mode. *Laughter* And that is all that I seen of One Piece so far but it is early day so I am sure I will run into more.

MS: Yeah, I was here yesterday in Luffy cosplay but it was Skypeia Luffy with the little wristband he has on.

JMT: Nice nice nice.

MS: I was hoping you would be here yesterday so I could stare you down.

JMT: Yeah. It is a shame we couldn’t get in till really late last night so *in a sobbing tone* I missed a day of the con. Oh well…

MS: Ahh…There was a good few…There was a Vivi and a Pell one.

JMT: Nice nice nice.

MS: A small Vivi like six year old Vivi.

JMT: OH! That is so cute!

MS: Yeah but let get to the questions that you may or may not have heard before. We get ahead with this.

JMT: Sure.

MS: How much One Piece have you seen?

JMT: I seen just about all that has been released in the states and I seen all of the Skypeia arc that has been released so far and, which we are getting I think pretty close in being done with that which is great because I love it. Of course, you know I am partial to that *laughter*.

I love that arc but I really like the Drum Island arc too which I have seen that several times. I just love that whole story. I love it whole where it is set. I love the characters in that one. I love Chopper’s backstory. It breaks my heart. I have seen quite a bit of it. Quite a bit of it. I want to go back to watch it again and I try to get other people I know to watch it because I am kind of a One Piece crusader myself because I am a huge fan of the show. I didn’t know anything about it until I started working on it but man.... 

MS: And One Piece was your first big break out role wasn’t it with Eneru?

JMT: Yeah. Eneru really was my first….one of my biggest, earliest break outs and he has the distinguish being the very first character that I voice as a full time voice actor. Like I been working as a voice actor part time a couple of years before that but Eneru…like we just started out right as I…as I…branch out as a full time voice actor. He was my first real part as a real full time working actor.

MS: And I remember hearing when you first started as Eneru, you were expecting so many people to know you (as Eneru) but you got nobody instead you got all the Kyoya fangirls from (Ouran High School) Host Club right?

JMT: Yeah well…It is funny how it worked out. We recorded Eneru umm…It must be four years ago now and of course Ouran High School came later for me and Kyoya is what I am most known for really these days and so at the time I was working on Eneru. Actually laying down track on that character. I wasn’t- Nobody knew who I was because I really haven’t done that much so there was no reason for them to know who I was and it is funny now they know who I am though other characters now that Eneru is out four years later. So it is very gratifying to know that Eneru is a lot of people’s favorite villain in the series.

MS: He is an arrogant…douche? *Laughter*

JMT: Right. A total prick. A total prick. Arrogant, insufferable bastard. He is not somebody you would want to hang out with. You just do it because you are afraid he was going to kill you but that what makes him so much fun to play. I love playing the douches. *Laughter* Cause there is no upper limit. You don’t have to be the nice guy. You get the say these horrible things and I never do it in real life you know. It is a great way to vent your frustrations *Laughter* though your acting. There are many people I would like to act like Eneru around *Laughter* but you can’t do that. I get it out of my system in the booth.

MS: Alright. That’s good. That’s good. Here is a funny story. I was listening- I got the full complete set of (Ouran High School) Host Club about a year ago, back in March. I was watching that. I finally got a chance to watch it. I was listening to Kyoya and the ending credits were passing and I see your name (as Kyoya) and I was like, “What really? No way!”

*Laugther*

MS: Okay. I can’t believe it. You got such good range. (JMT: Thank you.) I mean I can’t recognize your voice as Kyoya between Eneru and that was right when the Skypeia arc was beginning coming out.

JMT: Yeah…Eneru, he is very deep voice, very booming voice, very stagey for me but thank you, thanks you.  It one of the things I love about voice acting so much because I feel I bless with…fair range of voices I can do that sound somewhat different. So I get a lot more work as a voice actor. I can do more with my voice then I could with my physical type because I’m a pretty big, hulking guy. I couldn’t play the real Kyoya. *Laughter* At that age nobody could have take me as a 17 year old or 16 year old guy but vocally maybe. 

MS: How did you develop that range though? Did it just came naturally?

JMT:  It came umm…I think it came naturally but I didn’t really discover it until I started voice acting. I had the great good fortune of having a number of really wonderful directors and other actors that were interested in casting me in roles that played against types. So I got to, I started doing stuff that was close to my natural voice which is usual for voice actors.

My first role ever was Rikichi in Samurai 7 which was back in 05’ and that voice was pretty much my own voice. He’s just a little huskier but it is pretty much my own voice. That same director that work on that show, the ADR director, Christopher Bevins cast me later on in something that was complete different than that. So right out of the gate I got to play two characters that were so different and I got to explore different areas of my vocal cords and after that I just kind of built a reputation for you know being able to do that.  So I got more work and the more work I got the more diverse my portfolio became. I was like; “Well apparently I can do all of this!” I didn’t know until I could have tried it. 

There are many times, the Eneru voice in particular, that was the first time successfully auditioned with that voice and actually wanted it. I used that voice in one other audition for a show that I won’t mention but I didn’t get the part in that one on the show. I was, “Maybe that voice was too over the top,” but it just happen to work perfectly as far Mike McFarland was concerned for Eneru. Lucky me! 

MS: That is good. You got the voice of Eneru. By accident I was listening to- Not by accident. More like I was curious to hear the Japanese track and I switch back to English and I was like, “Wow! You (Tatum) pull off a really good Eneru.” I mean the voice is almost the same. It is like the Japanese VA is speaking English.  

JMT: Yeah. I get told that a lot and that’s very gratifying cause I love the seiyu. The seiyu for Eneru is amazing. He’s really really cool. And a lot of that really has to do when we record, we preview the Japanese. Many of us study it quite extensity. I became obsessed with One Piece after we worked on it. So I got everything I could read up on or anything like that I could and of course I would always ask, “Could we watch that scene again? I just want to make sure…Oh okay. Okay whatever.” So I was really annoying as an actor because I wanted to revisit scenes in the Japanese to see if I, if we, were keeping the voice, the seiyu and I, the same level and it just turned out that way. So it was a lot of fun. A lot of fun. 

MS: That is good to hear because a lot of dub haters, I guess you could call them that, they always complain that, “They don’t put that much feeling into it. They always rush out the dubs. They don’t always pay attention to the small details.” I am guessing with One Piece, Funimation is treating that like it is their baby since it doesn’t seem like that at all.

JMT: That’s, Funimation, in my experience with Funimation, they treat every property they have like that. Funimation has the distinguish, for me at least, being run by fans of anime. I mean everyone who is in this business that I know grew up watching anime and many times back in the day before we knew it was anime. It was just something that was on TV when we were kids; it was anime that we were drawn to. (We) Had no idea where it came from or anything like that and all we knew were dubs. It was all that was on television when we were children. 

So we developed this passion for it and then most of us working in this industry now love the fact that we are doing it because this was part out of who we were during our formative years, was watching this stuff and getting, “Man it would be fun to be working on this stuff!” and we figured out as a kid, “Wow! That’s the thing, you can actually do that.”

*Laugther*

MS: Yeah! You can do that!

JMT: It’s cool. So Funimation has a lot of great, really talented people who really care about the shows. Sure there will always be dub haters but I think dub haters have slowly over time have gotten quieter and a little more decent about it. Because I think a lot of people have accept that dubs are better-

MS: Compare to where they were ten years ago. No, more than ten years ago.

JMT: Well compare to ten years ago. Well, just because now there is a chance for this generation of people who grew up on early stuff to come back and revisit it for whom anime was always part of their life in some form or fashion and now that they can work on it, you can tell the difference. There are a lot of good dubs; there are a lot of good dubs that work well. So, I may be bias. *Laughter*

MS: Yeah, I may be considered bias myself. I love dubs over subs because I enjoyed Ouran more than I as a dub then I watching it subtitled.

JMT: Yeah. I don’t care for subtitles because I don’t- I feel it distracts, or detracts rather, from the animation and for me, I said this elsewhere I think but I like to revisited often, what makes a dub interesting for me is you know, none of us treat like it is a competition with the original Japanese.  It’s certainly not. We are-Umm… I think Chris Ayres, a good friend of mines, himself is a marvelous marvelous actor and director, said we are caretakers of something. We are trying to bring it here and bring it to an audience that might not otherwise find it and hopefully lead them to the Japanese if they haven’t seen it before. If they are already familiar with the Japanese, we are giving them a different interpretation of it. By no means it meant to be better than the Japanese because that is just disrespectful. We wouldn’t even attempt it BUT I think to me it speaks how awesome the show itself in the animation is that it can support a wide variety of interpretation. One perhaps being the original Japanese and the other being English. 

So I love- It is the same reason why you go see different versions of a play you very fond of. You want to go see what they are going to do with it and it is not like you go see a version of Hamlet and go, “Oh okay it’s done. I never need to see that again. Whoever does it….” You want to go to many of them because it is a great play and you want to see how many interpretation it can sustain.

MS: Yeah. You just want to watch it again and again to see how different it is compare to something else.

JMT: Exactly and that is the fun part about dubs. I always liked dubs for that reason. Even shows- there are some shows that I do prefer the Japanese of but I still admire the dub. Some shows I prefer the dub. It’s different and some of them I find something to love in both because I am impress in how different the language is. 

The language barrier between English and Japanese is so vast that there is actually a lot of elbow room for subtext that one language can bring out better then another. So it is interesting to see how different the story can be depending on the language it is told in. I am fascinated by that. So I love watching dubs. If I were, if I spoke six different languages- If I found a show that I was really fond of I would actually probably go watch it in every language it has been dubbed just to see-

MS: How different it is?

JMT:  Yeah cause you get to revisit that material. It’s old but new! So that’s my take on dubbing.

MS: Alright, I guess we should get back to the One Piece here, for a while.

JMT: We should.

*Laughter*

JMT: Yes we should. Sorry. I do go off on a tangent.

MS: Yeah. That’s cool. What do you like about One Piece?

JMT: I love it because at the time I have never seen any show like it before. It was this really really crazy-

*Random OniCon con goer walks up*

Con Goer: I have shake your hand. You inspire me a lot.

JMT: Thank you man. I appreciate that.

CG: I know you guys are talking so I let you guys alone.

MS: That is okay.

JMT: Cool. Thank you.

CG: No problem. *walks away*

JMT: Do you want to ask that question again?

MS: Yeah…I ask that question again. I notice that he was going to show up. Umm…

JMT: Yeah. Do that question again. We start with that question again.

MS: What do you like about One Piece?

JMT: I- You know I love it because I love- …It is hard to describe why I love it. I am a big fan of like the adventure story. It sort of like, the kids going off and doing their things. I like grew up watching Terry Gilliam movies like Time Bandits and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and there is a lot of that spirit in the manga and in the show. 

I love the wild, crazy character designs. They are very appealing to me and I love the whole idea of pirates where they are the heroes. I love that trope and I never get sick of it and the fact that it is long as it is. I love big epic sweeping shows where they go and oh man! Okay so every story arc they are going to encounter new crazy characters that you know…it just like somebody’s imagination just exploded all over that thing and it’s BEAUTIFUL to watch it! So yeah- I love it! I never encounter anything quite like it at the time. I was like, “What is this show! This is cool!” movies. Like-
 

MS: “It’s crazy! It has a guy’s arm stretching like far!”

JMT: Yeah! I love that kind of stuff! It is like this fantastic goria of awesome imagery and just crazy funny. Sometimes very touching. I love the fact that I can laugh, just belly laugh watching an episode and then in the same episode I might start crying. It is really so, it takes chances. This show takes chances. It risks everything and it pulls it off beautifully. I love shows that have the guts to do that.

MS: And I know you own some of the manga, especially the pieces that involve Eneru but how much of the manga do you own actually?

JMT: Not as much as I would like to. I’m slowly building up my collection.

*Laughter*

MS: Oh okay.

JMT: I have, I think, currently I have six volumes of it of not including a couple here and there that I picked up that had to do with Eneru’s story when he actually makes it to the moon which I tried to get while we were recording him. So I slowly am building it. I get very little time to read but I do love the manga.

MS: Yeah. I started collecting the manga this year right when Viz was doing that whole speed up. It cost only $200 dollars to get all twenty-five of those volumes.

JMT: AWE!

MS: I think it was worth it. It looks nice on the bookshelf. Colorful, bright.

JMT: I love the box sets of manga like that. I have a few and maybe I’m gonna just going to ask all my friends to buy it for me for Christmas. “All of you pitch in and get me this!”

MS: Amazon Wishlist?

JMT: Yeah! *Laughter*

MS: “What is this? One Piece volume…1, 2…okay? Michael? What is on your wishlist?”

JMT: *Laughter*

MS:  “OH! Just give me that stuff.”

JMT: Oh…Yeah. I should totally do that. Actually that is a good idea. 

And there you have it! The first part of our interview with J. Micheal Tatum. I know that we didn't spend a lot of time talking about One Piece but we will get more about One Piece in the next part of this interview. Still I hope you could feel the enthusiasm that Tatum has for the show while reading the interview. This  guy is crazy for One Piece and he goes more into it in the second half of our interview.

So keep your eyes peel and expect to see the second part of this great interview next week!