Exclusive: One Piece's Mackenyu on Zoro, 'It was painful in season one'

Dubai: Mackenyu has spent more time thinking about Roronoa Zoro than almost anyone outside the writers' room. He grew up on the manga long before Netflix's live-action One Piece existed, and in an exclusive conversation with Gulf News, followed by a panel appearance at MEFCC 2026 in Abu Dhabi, he opened up about what it actually takes to bring the character to life, on screen and off it.

Zoro has been Mackenyu's favourite character since he was a kid, long before there was any chance he'd end up playing him. Asked what first drew him in, his answer went straight to something simple. "The way he is not afraid, is fearless, was something I admired since I was a kid," he said.

That early admiration didn't automatically translate into excitement when the live-action series was announced, though. If anything, being a lifelong fan made the idea feel riskier rather than exciting. "I didn't really want it to be live action," he admitted on stage. Once the role was actually his, the weight of it set in fast. "It was kind of scary. I didn't know how to bring Zoro to life at first. So there was a lot of pressure. But it felt like a dream come true."

That pressure to get Zoro right shows up most visibly in the fight scenes, and none more so than Whiskey Peak, the season two sequence where he takes on a hundred bounty hunters in one sitting. It's become the moment fans keep coming back to, and Mackenyu confirmed the number wasn't just there for marketing. "Of course we counted," he told Gulf News.

Getting there on set wasn't as simple as one continuous take either. "There were a couple of sequences we had to do. We split it up, so the first ten, then eleven onwards," he explained. "I told the showrunners that fans would count every single one, so we had to justify a hundred opponents properly."

The physical toll of the role runs deeper than any single fight scene, though. Zoro's signature three-sword style means fighting with a blade gripped between his teeth, and two seasons in, Mackenyu said the discomfort hasn't eased at all. "I don't think you ever get used to it," he said. "It was painful in season one, and it's still painful now."

Kicking, by contrast, was something deliberately written out of the character altogether. "I enjoy it, but it's just not part of who Zoro is," he said, drawing a clear line between his own physical strengths and what the role actually calls for.

None of that physical strain was what Mackenyu pointed to as the hardest part of the job. On stage, he said the real challenge has nothing to do with swords at all.

Zoro is the crew's straight man surrounded by constant chaos, and holding that line, he admitted, is harder than anything choreographed. "It's probably the hardest part. Keeping a straight face," he said, laying the blame squarely on his co-stars for most of the damage, before admitting, with a straight face of his own, that he's just as guilty of goofing around on set.

That admission set up a natural question: how much of Zoro is actually him? Mackenyu went straight to the mismatch first. "I laugh a lot. That's probably the least like Zoro." The overlap, when he found it, turned out to be a lot less dramatic than fearlessness or swordsmanship. "I can sleep anywhere. I can sleep right now on this chair."

Staying true to the character, on the page and on screen, isn't left entirely to instinct either. When a scene risks pushing too far from the source material, Mackenyu has a more direct way of settling it. "We have Oda sensei on the red phone," he joked, referring to Eiichiro Oda, the manga's creator. "I ask him, is this alright? And sometimes he says no, he doesn't like it, stop it. That's what we do on set."

With season three moving the Straw Hats into the desert kingdom of Alabasta, that same instinct for preparation has carried over into the physical shift ahead. Mackenyu had already started adjusting, having tested looks ahead of the Cape Town shoot. "It's definitely a different kind of heat to work in," he said. "It was very hot, but we got some beautiful shots out of it."

Staying camera-ready for a role this physical, he added, comes down to something far simpler than fans might expect: steady gym work and disciplined eating. "Proper dieting is the hardest part, honestly. I try to stop eating around eighty percent full rather than completely full. That's really it, there's no secret to it."

Even with all that preparation behind him, one thing was still on his list by the time the visit wrapped up. Despite having passed through the region before, this was his first stop in the UAE specifically, and a trip to the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque was what he was excited about. "I haven't been yet, but I've heard it's beautiful," he said.