How Tony Tony Chopper Came to Life (Exclusive)

[This story contains spoilers from One Piece season two.]

In Netflix’s live-action One Piece adaptation, the epic journey of the Straw Hat Pirates is as much about where you go and what you face as who is along for the ride. And in season two, one of the most anticipated characters joining Luffy (Iñaki Godoy) and the Going Merry crew on their journey through the Grand Line is Tony Tony Chopper. 

Straight from Eiichiro Oda’s best-selling manga, the beloved talking reindeer makes his official debut as part of the Drum Island arc. A character bursting with emotion — and the occasional profanity — Chopper’s story is connected to one of season two’s biggest themes. “Chopper and Dr. Hiriluk’s story is so much about saying nothing is impossible,” co-showrunner Joe Tracz tells The Hollywood Reporter. “Which is a mantra that is very close to Luffy’s heart, too.”

According to actress Mikaela Hoover, who serves as Chopper’s voice and facial motion capture performer, the character’s backstory and interpersonal relationships were deeply relatable. “At the end of the day, he just really wants to be accepted,” she explains. “I’ve also experienced not feeling seen, somebody loving you, and then turning their back on you. I feel so connected to him in those ways that it was easy to pull from my own experiences when I embody him. I feel like I’m healing some childhood wounds in myself.”

While Chopper’s journey to becoming a Straw Hat is poignant, translating the character into a live-action form that could earnestly capture that presented a few challenges, with Oda even acknowledging in the One Piece: Into the Grand Line – The Official Podcast he “was worried” initially. “They did tend to see Chopper as this living creature at first, concerned about being true to the animal bone structure, for instance, and bringing some realism to his look,” he said of the materials the team shared in the early stages. “So I suggested they think of him as a stuffed toy. If you make him too realistic, it’ll go into uncanny valley.

“Chopper’s voice was something we discussed a lot to get right, too,” he added. “When I think of ‘cute’ characters in live-action Hollywood films, their cuteness feels a bit tongue-in-cheek to make them more palatable to adults, and quippy. But Chopper needs to look and sound cute. I think it’s a cuteness that’s unique to Japan.”

As Chopper’s story goes, he consumes the Human-Human fruit, a type of supernatural “Devil Fruit” that grants humanistic powers — intelligence, speech, and a human-hybrid form. It also allows him to transform into a more traditional reindeer “filtered through the lens of Oda-san,” notes Tracz, and his “Heavy Point” version, which the executive producer likens to a “big hulking Yeti,” meaning the team had three forms in season two they had to adapt. 

“We also had a Chopper stand-in that we could use for a visual reference for the effects,” says the co-showrunner. “And there’s one shot, I’m curious if anyone will know it, where Chopper is actually the Chopper stand-in. It’s just a challenge for anyone who wants to go through shot-by-shot and try to figure out the one time [hybrid] Chopper’s not VFX this season.”

Otherwise, “bringing Chopper to life was really a team effort between performers, VFX and prosthetics, and it turned out to be the only way we could do it,” with the question then becoming, “do we do the Sweet Tooth approach of a kid in antlers? Do we do the Baby Yoda approach of a puppet? Do we do the Rocket Raccoon approach, where it’s VFX creation?” the executive producer recalls. “How much Chopper has to carry in the story meant that we needed the nimbleness of VFX. So we worked with Framestore, the VFX house that created Rocket Raccoon, and benefited from all their knowledge of how to create a really memorable VFX animal creature.”

Early look development and creature design started about a week after One Piece got its season two pick up, says VFX Supervisor Victor Scalise, with Framestore artists delivering the designs and the One Piece VFX team building the model before animators began their work. For Chopper’s reindeer form, Framestore played a major role in realizing the creature, which is based on the Japanese Sika deer. Both teams watched a slew of reference videos “to get the nuances of how [the deer] lifts its head, takes a step, or balances its weight and pushes on its legs,” Scalise tells THR. “We went bigger with the eyes, but we kept the snout more realistic. We wanted it to feel like a real deer while still having it be a One Piece creature.”

Scalise notes that numerous decisions also went into the details of Chopper’s hybrid physicality. “With his hooves, we kind of used a dog [paws] texture. Because he doesn’t have articulated fingers, we had to design it so he could pick up anything, like a syringe. And if the stairs are too tall, he has to crawl up. He can’t step,” he says. Scalise praised the “rockstar” work from the “magicians” at Framestore, while adding that it is actress Mikaela Hoover’s “performance and spirit that drives it, and made it a success.” 

As the facial capture performer for both the reindeer and human-hybrid forms, Hoover’s face was scanned and mapped one-to-one into a 3D model, so animators knew “the proportions and they distributed properly to the muscle simulations and other details of Chopper,” says Scalise. “The animators go in and give it a fine polish. If an expression needs to be exaggerated a little bit, they push that. We wanted to make sure Chopper’s performance of being sad and angry all gets translated through a deer face.” 

In the studio, the team used two cameras to capture her performance, with Tracz, other producers, and Framestore in the room to support her during the process. “They’d have a screen for me and had the cast up on the screen, and they’d have me act off it,” Hoover tells THR, noting that she mostly worked separately from the cast, minus one “incredible” table read in South Africa. “Sometimes we wouldn’t have anyone to act off of, so I’d just have to get into Chopper and do my own thing, which is difficult, but we did it.”

Tracz tells THR that Hoover also recorded lines before filming, so those on set had a sense of how she would deliver the character. When it came to how she approached Chopper’s voice, the performance was aided by the fact that the actress — who initially turned down an audition so she could focus on her work on season two of Beef — didn’t really understand Chopper as cute, but a deeply wounded and even grotesque monster. 

“The breakdown was that he was a forest creature who nobody loved. He had been an outcast his whole life and was looking for acceptance. I’m not sure why, but I interpreted that as him being this ugly, slimy, green monster. In fact, when I went to producers, the physicality I had was one shoulder hunched over, one eye shut,” Hoover says. “He’s this little being that’s felt so ostracized by his whole community his entire life. He’s never felt cute, and if I were to play into that cuteness, it wouldn’t work, because he doesn’t believe that he is.”

She also didn’t watch the anime. “I remember after a few sessions saying to Joe and one of the producers, Steve Welke, ‘Should I watch?’ And they said, ‘Honestly, we love so much what you’re doing, you should just keep on this journey. Oda-san picked you for a reason,’” Hoover recalls. “Now, after filming season two, I have seen some of the anime in Japanese, and the actress is absolutely brilliant, but we’re very different, and I think that to copy the anime would have been a disservice. I’m sure fans are going to feel a certain way, but I had to let all of that go and just trust my interpretation and trust the work — trust that this is how Oda wanted him portrayed.”

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While Hoover worked in the booth, N’kone Mametja, a South African performer, was cast as the on-set proxy for the CGI character. Tracz likened the performers’ relationship to what was done in Guardians of the Galaxy, with Hoover serving in the role of Bradley Cooper and, on set, Mametja in the role of Sean Gunn. “N’kone wears a big antler piece to represent how big the hat is, so we know how big [it] is in shots because that hat is huge,” he explains. “She’s able to be there for the actors, so they have someone to perform with — so that there’s a real vision and we’re getting real performances. You’re not acting against a tennis ball.”

According to actress Katey Sagal, Mametja’s performance work as Chopper opposite her Dr. Kureha “was so good and so endearing — so easy to like and also easy to be annoyed by. So it didn’t really feel like I was working with something that wasn’t there. She was there, and it wasn’t difficult to hit those emotional notes.”

As for Chopper’s third form, Heavy Point, another South African performer, Gavin Gomes, was tasked with wearing “the heaviest suit in the world with the heaviest prosthetics in the world, and still performing action scenes in them,” says Tracz. Jaco Snyman, One Piece’s head of prosthetics, led the construction of Chopper’s practical iteration, an experience he describes as “quite tricky.” One particular challenge was ensuring continuity between Chopper’s drastically different forms. “We tried our best to do a man-in-a-suit version that still matches the aesthetics of the [hybrid] VFX version and designed multiple suits with different proportions; to try and get the T shape that Chopper Heavy Point has in the manga,” he explains. “All our designs go past Mr. Oda, and he just kept saying, ‘Make the shoulders wider.’ He wanted him to be monstrous.”

Another was driven by casting, as the team — who already had Heavy Point’s designs — had to wait for Gomes’ arrival before they could complete the 3D body scan necessary to ensure the suit fit perfectly. “They went through quite a few actors until they found Gavin, who’s got the right mixture of being able to use his body and the acting of the character. He helped bring this whole thing to life,” Snyman says. Once they found their performer, the team engineered a muscle-suit system that works underneath a four-way stretch fur suit, with all of Chopper’s muscle groups separated so they operate independently from one another. “All these muscles have the insert points and the attachment points where anatomically those big muscles would be, so when he moves around, you can actually see the muscles move under the fur,” he says. 

As for Heavy Point’s face, “we went through quite a few tests to see if we needed to add fur, if we could create his face practically as a prosthetic application, or if it needed to be VFX to match [the CG Chopper]. We ended up going with a prosthetic mask and we decided to keep it as skin because you can’t really tell from the manga if it’s skin or hair,” he explains. Alimanova Vera, the Head of the Hair and Wig Making, helped the prosthetics team with Heavy Point’s contact lenses and nails, along with color choices and “a little bit on painting the face” to find balance. “They’d painted it and painted it, and it looked good, but it felt flat. All I did was give it some depth by shading into the eyes, opening up the cheekbones a bit more — bringing that animalistic feeling into the human features well,” she says. 

While Gomes acted, Hoover would also be responsible for Heavy Point’s voice, something she says she wasn’t aware of “until we were into a couple of sessions,” she tells THR. “For Heavy Point, I think it was so hard for me because that isn’t my acting. That’s Gavin, and they had already shot this stuff with him — which we’re doing a little differently this [third] season — so I had to match his physicality and lips, which was a different process. I had to still keep Chopper inside of me, but become this kind of monster. That was the most difficult, but I had a lot of support in the room, and we just did it until it looked right.”

The season ends with Chopper choosing to set sail with the Straw Hat Crew, leaving the spirit of hope and Dr. Hiriluk back on Drum Island. But not without a little tease of what’s to come, as Chopper pulls out of his bag something that signals even more transformations: the Rumble Balls. “After seeing three transformations, it’s fun to tease those rumble balls and to be like, ‘There’s more to come! Wait until you see what else they can do!’” says Tracz. Adds Vera, “I think if you loved Chopper in season two, you’re gonna fall madly in love with Chopper in season three.”

One Piece season two is now streaming on Netflix.