One Piece Season 3: Cast reveal what it took to build Alabasta—160,000 pounds of sand and more

Dubai: Building a desert kingdom from scratch takes more than a good location scout. At MEFCC 2026 in Abu Dhabi, the cast of Netflix's One Piece pulled back the curtain on just how much work goes into bringing the show's world to life, starting with a number that made everyone gasp in the room: 160,000 pounds of sand.

Charithra Chandran, who plays Nefertari Vivi, was asked what she could reveal about the upcoming season. Rather than tease plot, she offered logistics instead: roughly 72 tonnes of sand, brought in to help construct the desert kingdom of Alabasta. Season three, titled One Piece: The Battle of Alabasta, went into production in Cape Town after season two premiered in March, and has since wrapped filming ahead of its 2027 release.

Chandran didn't downplay what the shoot demanded of the cast and crew. "The hours are crazy and the filming is so demanding," she said. "Everyone is just so invested in making it as good as possible." She summed up the scale of the effort behind every finished scene plainly. "For anything to appear on screen, there needs to be a million things that go right."

Given how closely fans guard the source material, it would be easy to assume Chandran was handed a strict rulebook for playing Vivi. She said the opposite was true. "I felt a lot of freedom, because they were so supportive," she explained. "I wanted to create something new, but I also didn't have a concern about deviating from the character."

Mackenyu, who plays Zoro, had already started feeling the effects of that desert build-up before Chandran ever mentioned the sand. Speaking separately to Gulf News, he described testing looks for the new setting ahead of the Cape Town shoot, a shift from the snowy Drum Island backdrop of season two to something considerably hotter. "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."

The scale of the world-building goes back further than Alabasta. On a separate panel, Jacob Romero, who plays Usopp, recalled the season two sequence shot inside Laboon, the whale, as the moment that best captured what the production is capable of. "We are inside of a whale right now. This is insane," he remembered thinking during the shoot. "We're going to work every night inside a whale. They've got the stomach juices bubbling. There's skeletons decomposing in there."

What ultimately sold him on it wasn't anything decided in the moment but the work that had already gone into the set before the cast arrived. "The sets are insane. There's so much absurdity already built in by the time we step on set. We just have to live in it when we get there."

Getting that balance right, between the show's inherent absurdity and something that still feels grounded, was a question the production wrestled with from the start, Romero said. "How do we ground this, and make it feel real in an absurd world? I think that we're doing a pretty good job."

There's also a strange side effect to disappearing into a character this fully. Vivi's blue hair, much like Chandran's earlier breakout role as Edwina Sharma in Bridgerton, has given her a kind of public anonymity her co-star doesn't get to enjoy. Walking around with Iñaki Godoy, who plays Luffy, the difference is obvious. "I feel like Superman and Clark Kent," she said, describing how he gets stopped constantly while she often slips by unnoticed.

By the time the panel wrapped, the scale of what goes into a single season, sand, sets, stomach juices and all, had made one thing clear: for a show built on larger-than-life adventure, the effort behind the cameras is just as outsized.