Hiro Shimono

Hiro Shimono was born in Tokyo in 1980 and is affiliated with the agency I'm Enterprise. He is a singer as well as a voice actor, and his casting has been remarkably consistent for two decades: if a role calls for a young man whose nerves are permanently one notch from breaking, the shortlist starts with him.

Zenitsu Agatsuma in Demon Slayer is the extreme version and the one that made him a household voice, a panic attack rendered as a sustained scream held right at the edge of tears, which he then has to switch off in an instant when the character stops being afraid. Connie Springer in Attack on Titan is the same frequency used for comedy first and then, gradually and without any change in technique, for something much bleaker as the series wears its cast down. Dabi in My Hero Academia is the interesting outlier, played almost bored, low and dry, and it works precisely because everything else in his range is loud.

The breadth underneath those three is substantial: Naki in Tokyo Ghoul, Alone in Saint Seiya: The Lost Canvas, Isidro in Berserk, Hanzo Urushihara in The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, Oshikiri across both Junji Ito anthologies, Nacht Faust in Black Clover, Julian Loki in Blue Lock, Taketo Aida in Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid. He also voices Keima Katsuragi in The World God Only Knows, Rex in Xenoblade Chronicles 2 and Ryunosuke Naruhodo in The Great Ace Attorney, none of which are catalogued here.