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Emerging in 2020 with a standout role as Legoshi in Beastars, Jonah Scott has quickly made a name for himself as a premier talent in the anime voice acting world. His dynamic portrayals of characters such as Legoshi, Kokushibo in Demon Slayer, and Willy Tybur in Attack on Titan have not only captivated audiences but also solidified his reputation as a versatile actor. With a slate of prominent roles on the horizon, Scott’s career shows no signs of slowing down.
As fans eagerly anticipate the final season of Beastars, Jonah Scott took some time to chat with CBR. In the interview, he delved into his theatrical background, shared insights into his approach to voicing Legoshi, and revealed how mimicking League of Legends characters played a pivotal role in his journey to becoming a professional voice actor.
CBR: What led you to pursue a career in voice acting? Did you have any prior experience in performing arts?
CBR: Was your alma mater Hilltoppers?
Jonah Scott: My introduction to performance [came] really young. However, I was not what the industry would call a child actor.
My parents weren’t helicopter parents; they didn’t push me into an industry or anything like that. Matter of fact, I’m from Kentucky, near Cincinnati. I was born and raised in the Ohio Valley, and the theater scene there is pretty good.
My parents needed some time away from the kids, so they put my sister and me in this after-school program on Fridays. We would go to an after-school called Moss Dance and Performing Arts Academy — shout out to Joe and Amy Moss, they were the ones that taught me how to act.
This is a story that I tell all the time, but as a kid, we learned what I learned in college to be high-level, academic theatrical training techniques. Joe and Amy made them a little bit more accessible, so that this simian act of reacting — the monkey-see-monkey-do of acting — was incredibly easy for a young mind like mine to absorb. At, like, 8 years old, my brain was so elastic, my voice was so elastic, and at least 4 hours a week, I was training.
I had voice lessons and stuff, but I was able to have a childhood outside of that. I wasn’t sequestered away on set, being taught by a tutor, and I didn’t get paid to do any of my stuff, so there was no legal overhead or anything.
For 10 years, I did that until I aged out of their program. And then I stayed for another year, teaching the kids how to act. Eventually, I had to do the Steve from Blue’s Clues and go to college — speaking of which, I met him the other week, and he’s a really nice guy.
I went to Western Kentucky University.
CBR: Hilltoppers, right?
Jonah Scott: The Hilltoppers, buddy! Oh, yeah!
I majored in musical theater [there], so I just kind of thought that’s where I thought my life was going to go. I was able to have time outside of [studying], so what I did was play video games, watch anime, read fantasy books, play Dungeons & Dragons, and do a bunch of nerd stuff. That was where I made a lot of friends.
But I’m so grateful for my stage experience in university, because it taught me the value of teamwork without being on something like a sports team. It taught me the value of working together and trying to put something together as a unit.
When you’re learning musical theater, tou don’t get to be the lead every time. Even if you’re incredible, you don’t get to be the lead every time. You have to go through [the roles] and see what everybody else is touching. Front of house, ushers, and concessions; those are all actors that are in the musical theater program.
I really, really liked that aspect, because after [my previous experiences], when I got to university — and this isn’t me tooting my own horn or anything — but when I got to university, I was just like, “I already know this stuff! Joe and Amy taught me these collegiate acting techniques when I was 9!”
I actually went to New York City, because for the longest time, I thought I was gonna be on Broadway. I’m was like, “I’m the lead, I have a leading man voice, I’m the lead tenor in all the operas — I would at least [like to see] how the sausage is made, right?
So I audited auditions in New York City, which is a rarity. One of my friends afforded me the opportunity to do that.
When you audit an audition, you just kind of sit in the back of the theater and watch the auditions that happen. And I didn’t like it — I hated it, as a matter of fact.
[They] spoke so bluntly and so fiercely. Maybe it was the particular director or the producer, but you could be axed from the auditions because of the color of your shoes or how you tied your tie or if you wore the wrong hat. It was arbitrary. So, where do I go? Semi-professional League of Legends.
I wasn’t on esports shows or anything like that, but I was very good. Our team gave us a little bit of a stipend, and we had a bong in the community center that we would go and play in. It was f****** freezing, by the way — we were all in Snuggies when we were playing.
Information is the currency of esports, so knowing more than your opponent means that you’re able to outplay them, right? I was an AD carry, and I wasn’t a shot caller, but I was a playmaker. I’d be like, “Hey, we should do that,” and then the jungle would be the one to initiate everything.
But my tick, my vocal tic over comms was to mock heroes’ ult [voice] lines. And if you know a fair amount about competitive gaming, you know that when a hero calls out their ult line, that means the opposing team checks that box and says, “Okay, that character won’t have that ability for 2 minutes.”
My impressions were… [real] impressions, right? I don’t voice anybody in League yet — that’d be really cool — but my teammates were like, “Whoa, that’s really good. F****** cut that s*** out, because you’re screwing up the entire game, by the way.”
It didn’t register to me because I was just saying Ezreal ult lines. But the thing that made me think about it more was my teammates going, ‘That’s good! It’s really good! It’s too good, but it’s really good! You should probably do something with that.’
So, I literally had to sit down for a week, and be like, ‘What do I do with this?’ I had Rock Band in my dorm room, so I had a RockBand USB microphone that you just plug in.
I took the initiative, and I found some stuff online to audition for on Voice Acting Alliance — the old forum. I submitted all of my auditions, and lo and behold, I started booking a lot [of roles]. I booked radio plays, audio dramas, and I found a group of friends there that I’ve kept for life. We still play D&D every Wednesday.
Jonah Scott: [Those roles] were how I figured out that voice acting isn’t just bringing in the producer to voice this guy for a little bit. It’s not all Chris Metzen voicing Varian Wrynn. There are actors that audition for these things, and in some cases, like in Warcraft 3, you have real seasoned film actors coming in and doing really robust, intense, dramatic stuff.
That’s what flipped the switch in me. I was watching some anime dubs, and — not to discount the dubs, because they’re amazing — but I thought, “I could do that! That’s easy!”
[At that point], I was like, “I have the bread to the acting sandwich. I just need the little tiny pieces of meat on the inside to make it a really good meal and figure out what I’m doing.”
For junior and senior year. I auditioned for indie games, and I was booking left and right. Eventually, I told my dad, “Hey dad, I’m making more money doing voiceover than I am making sandwiches at the deli.” And he’s like, “Alright, I think there might be something to this. Go for it.”
The next year, I moved to Los Angeles.
CBR: To keep with the sandwich analogy, as you started trying these different flavors of acting, what were you drawn to?
Jonah Scott: I love that question. What really resonated with me was the opportunity to do a film performance in a vacuum.
I have done film before, and people say that I look good on a camera –
CBR: You look great on your camera here, so I have to agree with them.
Jonah Scott: I’m a streamer on Twitch, by the way, come watch my VTuber. [Laughs]
But I was really inspired by these performances in games like, Bioshock, or The Last of Us, or these big high narratives that have a lot of really good writing, like Elder Scrolls. I was drawn to being able to do these really grounded, real, cinematic, intimate, melodramatic moments that need to be dialed up a little,
if you’re on film, less is more, but if you’re doing an anime or a video game, you have to take the less is more approach, and then still turn it up a little bit. You have to heighten things, but you have to be cinematic enough for people to get that this is an intimate moment. It’s a fine line to walk, and it’s one that I absolutely love walking.
Then, there’s the opposite end, where I do things like JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. There is some melodrama, but it’s like a soap opera or even an opera, because the characters are saying how they feel out loud in front of everybody. There’s no internal thoughts, or if the internal thoughts are internal, they still sound external. It’s a flashbang of emotion and action.
Those two ends of the spectrum are what really sucked me into voice acting, specifically.
CBR: Looking at Beastars and Legoshi, the show seems to share a lot of overlap with your own theatrical experience. When you first heard you would be playing Legoshi, how did that resonate with your personal background?
Jonah Scott: [Beastars] smacks of theater in the first and second season especially, where it centers around stage play and the protagonist-deuteragonist-tritagonist [structure]. Legoshi is a lighting person, and then the next day, he’s on stage — he’s the guy!
I think that Legoshi is a character that everyone can relate to at certain points in the season. Like Catcher in the Rye, it is very much a bildungsroman. It is a coming-of-age story told through this anthropomorphic lens that honestly, in my opinion, weeds out people who are just going to skip over it because of the anthropomorphic lens. You’re really missing an opportunity if you don’t afford yourself the time to watch at least 4 or 5 episodes of it, and then you really start to sink your teeth into it, no pun intended.
Legoshi relates a lot to me, and I’m sure you, too. At some point, everybody grows up with the same broiling crucible of hormones inside of them, and [his story] is a way for us to look at somebody trying to deal with trying to be an adult [while] struggling with this instinct that we all have because we’re humans.
[Beastars] is kind of an allegory for awareness — sexual awareness, awareness of one’s self, awareness of one’s familial history, or where you come from. It’s an allegory for a lot of stuff, and I feel like people can put a post-it note on a lot of different parts of Legoshi for themselves. My challenge in that was to make everybody feel something.
So if you sit down and watch Beastars, and you’re angry at the fact that they’re anthropomorphic animals — the art made you feel something. Or, if you sit down, and you watch it, and you’re like, “This is intense, and I’m a little embarrassed, a little shocked, a little into the moment,” then the art made you feel something. If you watch Beastars and enjoy the journey in any way, we did our job.
Legoshi is such a deep character that it’s almost criminal we didn’t get to get a better look at him or the people who surround him. The entire cast is stellar: Patrick Seitz, Lauren Landa, Ben Diskin, Damon Mills, Bryce Pappenbrook.
CBR: What’s unique about going into a main character like Legoshi? How would you compare it to something like [Attack on Titan’s] Willy Tybur, who is more of a one-note quick performance?
Jonah Scott: Well, Willy Tybur’s an asshole. [Laughs]
But yeah, Legoshi, specifically kind of snuck up on me. Telling this story became more and more personal the more the story was told for a lot of reasons. This might get a little heavy, but within months [of being cast], my mother passed away of a heart attack — quite suddenly, as a matter of fact. And it hit hard, because I realized that she would never be able to see the fruits of driving me to Joe and Amy Moss’ acting class and picking me up from my rehearsals and going to see my performances.
She will never be able to see the professional side of that, and that really was — and still is — kind of hard to deal with. As I go into every session, I remember my mother and I’m like, “I’m gonna do a good job for her. It’s not for anybody, it’s not even for me. I’m gonna do a good job for her, and then we’ll attach fans to it and make it something.”
So, relating to Legoshi became really real. In the show, he loses his mother at a certain point, and there are entire scenes where I have to sit down and talk about that. I have to live in a moment that I have experienced.
And it’s really heavy. There was a certain point recording those specific scenes where I had to… I thought I was stronger.
I thought I was going to be able to kind of push that down, be professional about it, but grief, it wells up in ways that you can’t predict. So, after we were done shooting those scenes, I went out to the director and said, “Hey, I’m gonna need a lap. Let me go take a walk for a second and [then come back to] get this done.”
And that was where I explained everything, because I hadn’t told the director or anybody, because I didn’t want anybody to treat me any different.
I don’t want to be treated with kid gloves, you know? I’m an actor, I want to get in there and do this. I’m not gonna complain about much, [and] I’m gonna make it happen. But, having that vulnerability well up was something I had never experienced doing my art before, even on stage. So, it was a lot, and for that reason, it was real.
I cried during the actual take that they took. When I came back, I did the whole scene again. We listened to both takes, and me and the director looked at each other, and we’re just like, “This is heartbreaking. We have to use the one where you cried.”
Like I said, it’s something I had never experienced before as an actor or an artist.
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CBR: At this point, Beastars debuted 6 years ago. I’m sure you’re excited about the final season, but it’s also bittersweet to be watching it head into its final stages. Where’s your head at right now as you reflect on the series?
Jonah Scott (He/Him): My head is looking toward the future, I think. Legoshi said it best: keep moving forward. Always keep doing what you need to be doing at the present moment.
But [Beastars] will forever be part of me. I do hope maybe we’ll get a spin-off, and maybe I’ll get a cameo. We have made our art, and we must now let it lie.
And I would be remiss to not mention the furry community.
Once I booked Beastars, my mom passed away, and I was really depressed. In my streams, I would tell people about what I’ve been working on, and that I finished filming Beastars [Season 1]. I was sleeping on my buddy’s floor for 2 years on a futon, and it wasn’t like I was making money hand over fist — still not. I had to move back home.
I was basically really honest [on my stream], and I said, “Hey guys, it’ll be about 2 more months, then I’m gonna be back in Cincinnati. and This was a really cool journey for me, but I think I’m just gonna try theater at the Louisville Opera or something like that.”
And the furries — oh, man, they came in and subsidized my living situation for 6 months? 8 months? Through donations, through subscriptions, through whatever means they had. I had an app that made it so that people could send me food. I would go on stream, somebody would send me dinner, we would eat dinner, we would talk on stream. I was just very accessible for them.
I was there to stand in front of that community with a sword and shield, and I still am, because they are some of the kindest, most charitable, most fun people I have ever met in my entire life. I will be a friend to the furry community until I die. I would not be in this apartment without them.
CBR: As opposed to playing a protagonist like Legoshi, how do you approach supporting antagonist roles like Demon Slayer‘s Kokushibo, One Piece‘s [Charlotte] Katakuri, or [Attack on Titan‘s] Willy Tybur?
Jonah Scott: Whereas, Legoshi is a protagonist, Katakuri is an antagonist, — not necessarily a villain. Then, Kokushibo is a villain with villainous intent.
I’ve read the manga, so I know what exactly what happens. I won’t say what happens in [the next Demon Slayer] movie. But, there is a rich, multi-layered backstory to Kokushibo that I really hope we get to dive into, because the best kind of villains are the villains that don’t think they’re doing anything wrong. They’re the villains that don’t think they are the villains.
Kokushibo mostly has just been aura farming for the past few centuries, grumbling to himself in the corner. [Laughs]
First of all, it’s been an incredible blessing. I say this a lot, but luck is a combination of opportunity and skill, or preparedness. And, I was very lucky. Shout out to everybody at Aniplex. They’ve been so kind, and they’re some of the most hardworking people in this [industry].
It’s exciting. Demon Slayer is a big deal, and I am the mini raid boss, you know? I’m the DPS check.
But I want to make sure that I’m delivering a good product to everybody, because people have certain expectations of what Kokushibo needs to sound like. From what I have gathered, [people] like what he sounds like so far.
The best compliment I think I’ve gotten was, “You sound terrifying.” And I think that that’s 90% the animation, because he does look scary. The animation team, the character design; he is a scary-looking guy.
I liken him a lot to Madara Uchiha.
CBR: Yeah, very much so. Even aesthetically, to some degree, with the hair and overall look.
Jonah Scott: There’s a lot of similarities there, and in personality, [Madara Uchiha] is kind of a touchstone for me for that. I had finished Naruto
like a year ago, and when I saw Madara, I’m just like, “Oh my god, that’s it. I get it now, that’s perfect. ‘What are you gonna do about the second one?’”
CBR: Oh, that’s such a good line. Had you read the Demon Slayer manga when you recorded the first lines for Kokushibo?
Jonah Scott: Yes. For something that is as important and culturally significant as Demon Slayer, you gotta do your homework. If you haven’t done your homework, you’re missing out, because it’s a good story.
I legit cannot wait to go into that booth as [Kokushibo] and get started in earnest. There’s so much build-up to it, but when you’re recording that stuff, it all happens so fast, too. It’s Demon Slayer. I want to spend an hour on one line, but you have to make sure that we’re not wasting too much money [on recording].
I hope I live up to people’s expectation, but when I go into a booth, I always say the same thing. I want to make a show I want to watch, because if it’s not up to my standard, then there’s no way it’s gonna be up to a fervent fan’s standard.
CBR: On that note, what are you watching? What are you playing? Is there anything that’s got you really interested?
Jonah Scott: Overwatch recently dropped a big thing, and I was a huge Overwatch player on my stream a while back. They got a bunch of new modes and stuff like that, so that’s been taking some of my time.
[Edmund McMillan’s] game, Mewgenics came out, which I’ve been playing Mugenics a lot. I want to say I have 35 hours in that in 2 weeks. I usually play a game before bed for 2 hours, and it’s mostly two runs of Mugenics.
I’ve been playing a lot of roguelikes. I’ve been saving all my AAA games to sit down on vacation and play a little bit. Things like [Ghost of Tsushima], and I want to do another playthrough of Red Dead Redemption 2 at some point.
What have I been watching? Battlestar Galactica! I reignited my passion for it, because after I dropped off two seasons in, I got an autograph from Edward James Olmos. So I was like, “Okay, I’m gonna go ahead.”
Stargate is another one I’ve been watching a lot. My metric for watching new shows is if I get an audition that has a reference to a character from a specific show more than twice on separate auditions, I’ll sit down and watch the whole show. Because those casting directors have deemed it culturally significant, so I should consume this.
Tangentially related, I’m a musician. My VTuber is the lead singer and drummer of an in-universe metal band that we have called Midnight Howl. But if you want to pick up the music, you just look up Alpha Aniki on Spotify. We have a 10-song original album out, and we’re working on a graphic novel that is origin story of the VTuber.
I stream 3 days a week or so, and we’ll play whatever. There’s some days where I just sit down and we surf the internet together and do random BS.
I’ve been doing it for 10 years, so I know the ins and outs of everything. And if you show up and it’s an anime boy on screen, it’s okay, trust me. You’ll be able to see my face eventually, but the anime boy is what draws them in, I promise. [Laughs]