Taz Skylar: The key to One Piece live action's success is "a combination of fandom and irreverence" to the original

When the Netflix-produced One Piece live-action series was announced, the current landscape of successful adaptations of both anime and video games to film and television was not yet as robust as it is today. In fact, the stakes were so high in terms of expectations, with what is considered to be the most important anime series in history, that no one dared to take it on. No one except the duo of Matt Owens (showrunner) and the director of the first season, Mark Jobst. And it seems that the formula for an adaptation that navigates so well between the original product and genuine ideas is as fine as the Grand Line, the mysterious sea that Luffy and the Straw Hat pirates will navigate in the second season of the series, could be dangerous.

We spoke to none other than Taz Skylar, the Spanish actor who plays Sanji in the series, about all this and more. Taz sat down with Gamereactor during San Diego Comic-Con in Malaga, and you can watch the full interview with subtitles below.

The success of an adaptation is based on balance. In One Piece it's the same, as Taz recounted. With Owens and Jobst "what I learned most from those two people was that you need a combination of fandom and irreverence towards the material itself".

"Because fandom is necessary to know not only what's special about it, but also what should remain, but also to synthesise it. Because only once you synthesise it do you really know the core of what that thing means. Because if you know what certain really special important things mean, then you are able to hold them in ways that are not literal and you are able to translate them."

"And then there's the irreverence, once you have confidence in the fact that you're a real fan of it, taking the absolute freedom to make it your own. Because if one thing Marc told us at the beginning that I thought was really special was that the anime is already perfect. And manga is already perfect. It already exists. Frame by frame, if we wanted to copy it, we could take the anime or the manga as a storyboard, shoot that, say the same lines, and that's it. But then we wouldn't be bringing anything to the space, whereas we actually take it and inspire something that brings something to the world of One Piece as additional material or story, that's bringing something. That's worth something."

Do you think we'll continue to see the upward success in One Piece's second season?