One Piece Season 2 premiered on the 2026 TV schedule a month ago, and by the end of it, the Straw Hat Pirates had recruited a new member. Just like in the manga and anime created by Eiichiro Oda, Tony Tony Chopper, the walking and talking reindeer, agreed to become the crew’s doctor once the Drum Island story arc wrapped up. Superman and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3’s Mikaela Hoover voices Chopper in the Netflix subscription-exclusive live-action One Piece adaptation, and CinemaBlend learned the reason why the actress crouched so much when she was in the recording booth for this project.
Ahead of my interview with Hoover, I found a One Piece behind-the-scenes video showing the work that went into bringing Chopper to life. That included some peeks at Hoover delivering her dialogue, and it immediately caught my attention how she was crouched in front of the microphone. When I asked if this helped her get into Chopper’s mindset, she answered:
Yeah, the animators in the frame store, they went off my facial capture, but also the physicality of him too. I mean, I was embodying him. So that helped me when I auditioned for him, even though I didn't know who he was, that helped me embody… I initially pictured him as being this little slimy forest creature that was green and really ugly and had one eye. So I always did that physicality quality. There's times when they asked me to stand and do it, but mostly I had a chair, and it was always my idea to have the chair and to be hunched over and slouched over and really feel like I was embodying him.
Thanks to eating the Human-Human Fruit, Chopper is able to switch between his natural reindeer form, a hulking human and a miniature human/reindeer hybrid. It’s that last form we see him most frequently in both in Netflix’s One Piece and the original source material. Because Mikaela Hoover was unfamiliar with the One Piece manga/anime when she was cast as Chopper, she had no idea that he was just a cute lil guy rather than the ugly forest creature she initially envisioned. Nevertheless, she was always going to crouch while playing him, and I like that she went that extra mile to see some authenticity to her performance.
Article continues belowHere’s that behind-the-scenes video for those interested, where we also see, as Mikaela Hoover mentioned, how her facial expressions were captured and used for Chopper’s 3D model:
Now that Chopper’s origin story is out of the way, we can look forward to him taking his first steps as a pirate doctor when One Piece Season 3 rolls around. Subtitled The Battle of Alabasta, next season will see the Straw Hats finally arriving to Nefertari Vivi’s desert kingdom, which is under threat by the Baroque Works criminal syndicate. Fellow Season 2 additions like Joe Manganiello’s Crocodile/Mr. 0, Lera Abova’s Nico Robin/Miss All-Sunday and Sendhil Ramamurhty’s Nefertari Cobra have been promoted to series regular for the next batch of episodes, and we’ll also meet folks like Xolo Maridueña’s Portgas D. Ace and Cole Escola’s Bon Clay/Mr. 2.
One Piece Season 3 will be released sometime in 2027. And without going into specific spoilers for those who haven’t read/watched One Piece in its drawn/animated forms, let’s just say that those of you who were taken in by Mikaela Hoover’s Chopper will be treated to some additional forms the character’s able to pull off. Meanwhile, Hoover can now be seen starting opposite Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan in Beef Season 2, which is also streaming on Netflix.
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