ARISE, Solo Leveling fans! The Solo Leveling ReAwakening film, which recaps the events of the first season, and includes a sneak peek at the first two episodes of season two, is in cinemas now! To celebrate the release, we chatted with the English voice of Jinwoo, Aleks Le.
Jinwoo gets up to a lot of crazy stuff in Solo Leveling, including boxing ancient knights, riding giant serpents, being tossed around, blown up, running away from monster centipedes, etc. and one thing about it all is that, somehow, Le makes it sound like that’s really happening to someone. If you look at his Instagram, you’ll see why; Le is fully animated while performing, acting everything out. As he tells it, voice acting isn’t an excuse to get complacent, physicality is everything!
“You want the character to not only sound like he’s doing the actual movement, you want to feel it as well,” Le tells Supanova. “There’s just something about actually portraying the character, whatever it is they’re doing, even the slightest detail can change how that sounds. So I just feel that it’s super crucial to embody the character. People say that ‘It’s voice acting, it shouldn’t matter ’cause they can’t see you,’ but people can hear the difference between whenever you’re doing something versus when you’re just standing there and saying words into a microphone. As with any acting job, I think it’s important to portray it to the best of your ability with all of your capabilities, whether it’s gonna be captured on camera or not.”
Jinwoo is many things in Solo Leveling; he’s a brother, a son, occasionally a sociopath, but through all of his adventures you can rely on the fact that you can’t reliably know what he’ll do next, especially in season two, when the stakes get raised even higher than in the first season. That being said, what aspects of Jinwoo’s character does Le relate to?
“His circumstances. In the very beginning of the story, he’s down on his luck, he wasn’t particularly talented or impressive by any means, but he wanted to be a good person. I feel that, through his journey, even though he was very self-sacrificing, he soon learned that the world was really unforgiving. Just because you want to be, or try to be a hero, doesn’t mean that it really matters in the eyes of others.”
“That’s not necessarily how you should live life, but it is a good-but-grim reminder that you do have to look out for yourself at some point, and seeing him understand that and feel that rage, and using it to propel him to a better place [was good], because initially, he was kinda running on spite and anger from being betrayed by the world, and that gave him the headstart that he needed to find his true power. I related to that a lot because that was me at the beginning of my career, I was not in a good spot because I wasn’t born with the wealth or ability to become a successful voice actor, or an actor, or to live out here in L.A., it was a really hard struggle and everybody else who had it easier and had to work less had it so much better and I was very envious.”
“That spite pushed me to work really hard for a while, but just like Jinwoo, I started to realise that you can’t live solely on spite or it’ll poison you and kill you eventually. You can borrow its power, but you gotta know when to hop off it. That’s what I like about this character, and I really like how it’s portrayed that he’s not perfect, he’s not the ‘good, moral hero’ or the ‘good protagonist’, he’s somebody who’s doing what he needs to do to survive, and I find that to be a really engaging story.”
Fun fact: Le actually didn’t get into voiceover via the conventional acting pipeline. Whereas a lot of voice actors got their start on the stage or in smaller productions, Le went the YouTube fandub route, and would learn by watching cartoons for sixteen hours a day and copying what he heard. We asked, for all the young voice acting hopefuls at Supanova, how does one overcome the “cringe” factor of starting out?
“You just have to live it man, you have to be cringe in order to be free from it,” he says. “It’s with anything, when you learn how to draw, you have to trace a lot of drawings so you can start to understand how it is to draw, what it feels like to draw, you have to copy other people’s work to understand what’s correct ’cause you don’t know any better, and at some point when you start experimenting on your own you’re gonna be pretty cringe, you’re not gonna be Picasso right away after a few drawings, you’re gonna have really, really bad drawings on the way there, but every bad drawing is an opportunity to learn and to improve.”
“So you just have to embrace it and understand that you’re gonna be cringe and over time, hopefully, if you keep paying attention to yourself and you keep having a good ear or a good eye for what makes something good, you start to recognise and implement that into your own process, and when it gets to that point it’s all about whether you have the skill to do that or not. I always say that there’s no harm in trying to learn anything and failing because that’s what we really need to do, we need to understand what’s good and what’s bad and in order to do that we have to face both sides of the spectrum, so to speak.”
From humble beginnings to playing some of the most recognisable characters in the world; Le’s voiceover résumé doesn’t end with anime, as he’s just become one of the youngest actors to play the Batman in DC’s Heroes United series! Regardless of the history of the role he’s stepping into though, Le is assured of his own abilities as an actor.
“Any time you walk into a franchise with a pre-existing fanbase there’s gonna be a lot of expectations, so I’m no stranger to that pressure of expectations. You can never please everybody, but it doesn’t really scare me to take on something like that, ’cause I know that I’m gonna do what I want to do, and I’m gonna do what I feel is best, because I’m a fan as well, and I want to make myself happy and also other fans happy. I just try to live in the moment, because it’s such an honour being part of franchises as big as that, and this, and all I want to do is go in there and do a good job. You gotta trust yourself, because if you’re not sure about what you’re doing, then you can never do anything.”
If you have nothing else, never lose confidence in your abilities and choices, and, failing that, fake it ’till you make it! That’s how Le got his big break after all. Unfortunately, or fortunately, Le says he’s too booked and busy to stop and take in that he’s become the face of several major franchises as an actor, from games like Street Fighter and Persona, to anime hits like Solo Leveling and Vinland Saga, but, despite all his successes, he does have a dream part that he’s yet to play.
“For me, a dream role would be to be in something new, something original, something that hasn’t been done yet, something that feels wholly mine. It’s cool to be in all these legacy franchises and all these pre-existing things, but what I truly crave is the challenge and ability to craft a narrative from the ground up and be a part of that, so that’s hopefully the next thing, so we’ll see where that goes.”
Le has no shortage of love for his fans, since, without them, shows like Solo Leveling or Demon Slayer would never become the cultural juggernauts they are now. And when you’re dealing with certain beloved shows, sometimes you owe the fans a bit of love in return, for the love they give.
“There’s a lot of things like that [referring to Thorfinn’s ‘I have no enemies’ line in Vinland Saga] in this show too, with the “Arise” scene, and so many others that people were waiting for. You don’t expect every production to be fully aware of whatever materials you’re working with, but personally, because I’m such a fan of these franchises, I know what I would want to see and hear as a fan, so it helps that I have been tapped into these way before they were even adapted. If you do a role that has been successful because of fans, then you kind of owe it to the fans to do a good job for them to show your appreciation for the source material.”
Thankfully, Le already had some knowledge of the Solo Leveling manhwa before he even stepped into the booth, but again, no pressure.
“Yeah I knew it was a huge deal and I have a lot of friends who love the manhwa, so I wanted to do this not only for myself but also for them, because I knew how much the series meant to them. Whenever I work on something like this, even though I’m a fan, when I put the creative hat on, I also have to remove myself from the process so I don’t get too caught up in it. But yeah, I was very much aware of the success and popularity of Solo Leveling and I was excited to take on the challenge.”
And finally, we had to ask, why should fans be excited for Solo Leveling ReAwakening and season two?
“Because we get to see him use his shadows in action, which is a really, really cool plot point that I can’t wait to see explored, we don’t get many shows about necromancers, so this one is really unique in how they approach it. I’m super excited to see those interactions between him and the rest of the world, and to see how he utilises his shadows and becomes more strategic about his fights. That’ll be a really cool shift to see. It’s very dark but it’s also very badass.”
Solo Leveling ReAwakening is in cinemas now for a very limited time, Supa-Fans, and viewers seeing it dubbed should definitely keep their ears open for a fun Easter egg that Le and co. slipped in, in his words, as a “reward and a thank you to the fans for sticking with us throughout the last season.”
