On Aug. 31, Matt Owens was feeling the pressure. ONE PIECE, the live-action adaptation of Eiichiro Oda’s bestselling manga series of all time, was about to premiere on Netflix and the showrunner was trying to keep his expectations in check.
Owens, who cut his teeth on Bad Robot’s Almost Human and worked his way through Marvel’s writers’ rooms (Luke Cage, The Defenders, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.), was hyperaware of fans’ mistrust when it comes to Hollywood adapting beloved anime and manga series. And even though Oda himself had endorsed the showrunner, telling fans, “He understands ONE PIECE more than anybody else,” Owens knew that if he let the world down, he was letting himself down too — as a fan first and foremost.
Thankfully, the epic pirate adventure series has become a bona fide hit and has been viewed over 57.8 million times to date. “It still hasn’t entirely set in,” Owens tells Tudum. The live-action show is executive produced by series creator Oda, created in partnership with Shueisha, and produced by Tomorrow Studios and Netflix. Owens and Steven Maeda are writers, executive producers, and showrunners. Marty Adelstein and Becky Clements also executive produce.
The response has been far-reaching and varied. Some fans are actively thirsting over ONE PIECE baddie Buggy the Clown (Jeff Ward) — “I send [memes] to Jeff all the time; he thinks it’s hilarious”— and even Jamie Lee Curtis is actively lobbying to play fan favorite character, Dr. Kureha. “We are writing this character for her, and so hopefully this comes to fruition, because the internet has spoken,” says Owens.
Below, discover 11 things Tudum learned from our interview with Owens that covers all things ONE PIECE geekdom. For even more, be sure to tune into Owens’ Reddit AMA here on Friday, Oct. 6, from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. PT!
Owens will be the first one to tell you that he wanted the gig so badly. The man owns every manga box set and enough ONE PIECE-related clothing to not have to do laundry for two months — that’s how much of a fan he is. So when the article came out announcing Tomorrow Studios had acquired the ONE PIECE rights, he wasted no time. “I emailed my entire representation team in all caps, ‘I NEED A MEETING ON THIS OR I’M SEEKING REPRESENTATION ELSEWHERE.’ ” It was an empty threat, (“I love my team”), but just goes to show how serious he was. When Owens went in to pitch himself, he promised the team that they were “not going to meet anybody else in this industry that knows or loves this property more.” He also threw in some ideas of how to break up the first season, leading with his knowledge and passion for the material at every turn.
His first meeting was in November 2017, but it wasn’t till five months later that he got the call that would change his life –– in April 2018 –– when Tomorrow Studios told him: “You’re the guy, you’re the one. What you said is true, we’re not going to meet anybody who knows or loves it more. Do you want to come and do this?” And Owens officially lost his mind. “Literally, it was a dream come true.”
Owens was 11 years old when he first found ONE PIECE, around the time anime was really picking up in the States (think: Pokémon, Dragon Ball Z, Sailor Moon), but “everyone in the community knows that initially the ONE PIECE version we got in the West was incredibly infantilized.” Though that version turned him off for a while, things changed for Owens after he had graduated from college and moved across the country to Los Angeles to make his way as a writer. “I fell into a really bad depression and I was trying to find something that I could do to keep myself from having to go do anything or be social,” he shares. “So I thought ONE PIECE is incredibly long, maybe this is the time to get into it.”
While at first ONE PIECE was an escape, it became the thing that helped pull Owens out of his depression because it is “such a wonderful story of friendship and found family, and all of the Straw Hats have such terribly tragic backstories and yet they still found their people,” he explains. “They found the strength both in themselves and in those close to them to heal the trauma of their backstories. It really encouraged me and inspired me to do the same, to lean on the people that I had around me and then pull myself out of this darkness in which I was existing.”
From that point on, his love for the series became a full-blown obsession and Owens shared this story with Oda when they first met.
Owens has read ONE PIECE at least three times, and every October he watches the Thriller Bark Arc of the anime as his Halloween tradition. He loves the series so much and knows if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. When he first met Oda, Owens made sure to tell him: “My job is not to take this story and make it my own. It’s one of the most popular series in the entire world for a reason. Why would you want to change what has been proven for over two decades as a winning formula?” Owens sees his job as shepherding the series as closely to the manga as possible — maintaining the spirit and nailing the characters. “That was something Oda had really appreciated,” says the showrunner.
This adaptation of ONE PIECE wasn’t the first time a studio or producers had gone to Oda, either. “There were people much bigger and much more powerful than I am who had attempted it before, but I came with a passion, a respect, and a sincerity that really resonated with Oda, and that was the launching point,” he says.
As a fan first, Owens has cherished the in-depth conversations he and Oda have been able to have about the world he’s created, what things really mean, and things that inspire him. “Those were the most fun parts of my entire job,” he says. “It didn’t matter if it was, ‘Hey, we’ve got to jump on a call at 6 o’clock in the morning.’ If Oda wanted to talk to me about something, I was always there, I would always jump at it.”
For Owens, any change was made in line with the spirit of the manga and SBS’s (Oda’s Q&A’s at the end of his manga volumes) and were intended to build on things to help deepen fans’ love for the story. “Nothing was changed or altered or left out because we thought we could do better than Oda or because we didn’t like something,” he says. “It was all in service of trying to find the perfect way to make everyone happy, to put Oda’s story out there as faithfully as possible, but in a live-action television series format in 2023.”
Take Zoro’s (Mackenyu) introduction, for example. In the manga, readers meet him when Monkey D. Luffy (Iñaki Godoy) meets him, tied up on a cross. But Owens wanted to show how strong and formidable Zoro is from the jump, so he pitched to Oda, “Hey, you’ve mentioned later in the manga that Zoro was once approached by Baroque Works and he actually killed an agent, Mr. 7. What if we started Zoro’s story in the live-action there? What if we actually get to see him fight?” To Owens, that was one of the really early moments where Oda could say, “OK, this guy does know what he’s talking about because he’s going into the text itself to find something new, but it’s in line with what [I] put out into the world.”
Owens is relieved fans understand that the live-action was never going to be one-to-one and that they’ve embraced changes like Mihawk’s (Steven Ward) characterization as more of a Boba Fett-esque bounty hunter (so fans can understand the warlords’ relationship to the world government more) and Arlong’s (McKinley Belcher III) early inclusion so he could become even more of a big bad for the season.
The bond between father and son figures is a theme Owens wanted to keep just as alive in the series as it is in the manga, especially between Sanji (Skylar) and Zeff. “They’re not related, but Zeff is Sanji’s father,” says Owens. “They love each other. He raised him, he taught him how to cook, how to fight, as a father.”
And that history and emotion you feel on-screen between the two of them is just as apparent off-screen. Indeed, Skylar is the reason Fairbrass got cast. “We hadn’t found a Zeff yet as we were auditioning, and Taz came to me one day and he said, ‘I don’t know if this is appropriate or a big swing or whatever, but you guys [should] talk to Craig Fairbrass. I’ve worked with him before, I love him. I think he’d be down.’ So we reached out. Craig read. Craig got the role,” says Owens.
You’ve all seen Owens’ Instagram chatter with the actor, so here’s what went down: “When the Season 2 writers’ room got together, we knew how far we were going to get and that this character Dr. Kureha was going to be a big part of the season,” says Owens. Curtis’ name had always come up and she’s spoken in interviews about being a ONE PIECE fan via her daughter. When people started asking her if she’d join the show, her response was always, “If the show is good and they want me when it comes back, yeah, I’d be interested,” says Owens. The day after she won an Oscar [for Everything Everywhere All at Once], the writers’ room decided to send her a figurine [of Dr. Kureha].
“We wrote a letter to her that said, ‘Congratulations on your new statue, here’s another one. Hope to talk to you soon. From the ONE PIECE writers’ room,’” says Owens. Curtis posted a photo of the figurine. Cut to the show’s release, and Curtis has reignited the idea, using Instagram to get the internet to lobby for her. “I took the opportunity to respond to say, ‘Hey, you don’t need to lobby. We already want you. Once we can talk, let’s talk,’” says Owens. “We’re writing this character for her, and so hopefully this comes to fruition, because the internet has spoken.”
Longtime anime and ONE PIECE fan Rudd was good friends with Owens before ONE PIECE ever came up. One time they grabbed coffee and Owens told her, “‘Hey, I actually might get this thing. Wouldn’t it be nuts if I got it? And wouldn’t it be even more fucking nuts if you got to play Nami?’ We were just like these two idiots sitting in a coffee shop talking about this.” Flash forward to the first day on set, and he and Rudd have a full-circle moment. “That was very special, to be able to to have someone to really share that kind of specific connection with the project.”
And that nakama (found family) extends to Ward, too, as he and Owens had worked together on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and had been manifesting another opportunity to team up. After Owens had already begun working on ONE PIECE, he asked Ward to dinner one weekend and pitched him the story and the character Buggy. “I was like, ‘This is who, if you’re down, I would love for you to play,’” says Owens. “‘I think you’d be amazing. It’d be really fun to work together again.’” And lo and behold, when Ward sent in his audition video, the unanimous response was, “Yup, that’s the guy. And now the entire internet is thirsting after Jeff Ward.”
Yes, that scene in which Arlong furiously talks about Jinbe points to some history that might exist between the two of them. Then there’s the Episode 6 moment in which Owens wrote a foreshadowing line where Zeff tells Garp (Vincent Regan) “there’s a new generation that’s coming.” He did this, Owen says, knowing that later in the manga, “Oda arrives at the concept of the ‘Worst Generation,’ which is a group of relatively new powerful pirates, [one of whom] the world seems to think is going to find the One Piece. And Luffy and Zoro are part of that group.”
You can very clearly see Shanks (Peter Gadiot) and Buggy — whose history Owens is eager to explore — as Buggy reveals to Luffy that he and Shanks worked on a crew together at his age. You can also spot Mihawk, a “green cloak–clad man, who might be someone to pay attention to moving forward,” according to Owens, and there might be a connection between a character you see in the execution and a character teased at the end of Season 1…
For the record, the writers’ room is not done with the scripts. “We have a very good roadmap, we have some outlines done, but there’s still some work to be done,” says Owens. He’s very excited about where the story is headed and eager to introduce some great new characters, especially since “Oda told everyone we’ll be meeting Chopper in Season 2.” The Straw Hats are also going to be in the Grand Line. “The place that we were talking about all of Season 1, we’re in it now.”
“First and foremost, thank you for giving us a chance. I was nervous. As much as I tried to be fan-forward in a lot of the decision-making that I did, everyone else was going to have their own opinions. And I’m just glad that fans gave us a chance. I’m glad that fans have enjoyed the show. I’m glad that they’ve found the Easter eggs. I’m glad that they appreciate some of the deepening of characters that we did. I’m so surprised to see so many people saying, ‘I can’t believe they made me like Helmeppo (Aidan Scott) this much.’
“There’s so many things that we did to expand, and I’m glad that those things resonate. I’m glad that they understand. There are critiques and there are valid critiques — nothing is perfect. And I’m excited to be able to take some of what fans have said and apply that to how we move forward. I’m thankful for the opportunity to be able to do that by getting a second season. I’m so glad that they see the love and that they love the show.”
ONE PIECE is streaming now.
