Entertainment

Meet Sally Amaki, the voice actress-idol whose funny videos regularly go viral: ‘Sometimes you just gotta vent’

CNA Lifestyle spoke with popular voice actress Sally Amaki about how she got her start in anime and just how much trouble her candid videos have landed her in.

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Hazeeq Sukri

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Earlier this year, I sat down with American voice actress, singer and idol Sally Amaki ahead of her fourth consecutive hosting stint at the 10th Crunchyroll Anime Awards in Tokyo, Japan.

Dressed in a mauve tulle dress and wearing a wide smile, the Los Angeles-born entertainer looked every inch the picture-perfect idol.

But if you’ve scrolled through her social media, you’ll know that the 26-year-old is anything but your conventional idol.

As a teenager, Amaki moved from Los Angeles to Japan to pursue a career in voice acting. After initially struggling with auditions, she landed a spot in 22/7, the voice-acting idol group and multimedia project produced by the prolific Japanese producer Yasushi Akimoto, whose credits include AKB48 and HKT48.

However, Amaki soon began attracting attention for something beyond her voice acting.

In 2017, clips of Amaki speaking English during her livestreams began circulating online, with viewers enamoured by the striking contrast between her Japanese- and English-speaking personas.

In Japanese, she came across as a polished, respectful idol that one would expect. Switch to English, however, and a far more comedic side emerged – one that was happy to crack morbid jokes, dole out memes and make unfiltered observations about everyday life.

The clips helped her find an audience beyond Japan, with her bilingualism and internet-native humour becoming a defining part of her appeal.

This popularity grew even more when she started her own YouTube channel, where she shares glimpses of her life as a voice actress and idol, alongside chaotic comedy skits.

Even her subtitles are a part of the joke.

In some of Amaki’s older videos, the English captions were less-than-literal translations of what she was actually saying, adding another layer of humour for fans.

Now almost a decade into her career, Amaki’s trajectory continues to be on the rise.

She has voiced Carol Olston in Tomo-chan Is A Girl!, becoming one of the rare few to voice the same character in both the Japanese and English versions of an anime. She has also nabbed roles in popular video games, including Kiriko in Overwatch 2 and Peni Parker in Marvel Rivals.

Yet, even as her portfolio expands, Amaki’s videos on social media still retain her signature wit, albeit with some polish.

Ahead of the ceremony, Amaki spoke to me about entering the anime industry and just how much trouble her sense of humour has gotten her into over the years, with her signature candour on full display.

Responses have been edited for length.

What anime had the biggest impact on you growing up?

Gintama. (laughs) I got introduced to Gintama in middle school. It’s what really got me into anime and made me an otaku.

Gintama is actually the reason why I wanted to become a voice actor in the first place. Before then, I didn’t even know voice acting was even a thing.

I was just looking at characters – like who voiced them – and then I found out the voice actor for Gintoki was Tomokazu Sugita, and I started listening to his radio shows.

And yeah, I got into the voice acting community, and I’ve been a fan ever since.

So without Gintama, I don’t think I would be here.

What’s been your biggest fangirl moment since becoming a voice actor?

Actually, the very first anime I was in was a sports anime called Dive.

My very first line was this Boy A – he didn’t even have a name – but it was a character introducing Tomokazu Sugita’s character.

And the producers didn’t even know I was a huge fan of Tomokazu Sugita.

It was just pure luck that my very first job as a voice actor was to introduce Tomokazu Sugita’s character.

So my inner fangirl basically died – exploded. Definitely a great day.

What part of the anime production process do you think is underappreciated?

I would say, definitely everybody except the voice actors. (laughs)

I feel like the voice actors get enough recognition, especially in Japan – they’re basically in every medium.

I feel like there are so many big names in the anime community that people at home wouldn’t even know because they don’t get much spotlight.

But yeah, they’re the unsung heroes. I don’t even think they get like 30 minutes of sleep a day during the airing of the anime.

They work so hard, and I appreciate them so much. So I feel like everybody should get more recognition, except the voice actors. We get enough.

Was there an adjustment you had to make when you moved to Japan?

The biggest culture shock I had when I first came to Japan and when I first started in this industry was during the audition process for the group that I’m in, 22/7.

In the sheet – the resume that we had to fill in – it asked for our chest, hip and waist sizes.

To me, back in 2016, I thought bigger was better, so I lied on the resume.

I wrote that my hip size was, like, huge on my resume, but everybody else apparently wrote smaller numbers. I was like, “What?! I thought bigger was better!”

That was a big culture shock for me.

But here I am, so I guess bigger is better, maybe. (laughs)

How much of your YouTube videos reflect your inner monologue?

I wanna say 100 per cent, but I’m also afraid to say 100 per cent just in case someday I get flamed for what I say. (laughs)

But a lot of the time, yes, it’s kind of like my cry for help, I guess.

Sometimes you just gotta vent stuff out. But if I say it in Japanese, my management team is going to be like, “Are you okay? Do you need to rest?”

But you know, sometimes it’s not that serious, but you kind of just want to let some steam out.

I feel like that’s what gets me going, you know. Instead of keeping it to myself and crying in my room alone, I vent out to the world.

Have you ever uploaded something and gotten into trouble for it?

Not on YouTube, but definitely my tweets. My tweets – many, many times.

I’ve been called to the office, locked in the room for like two hours, talking about like my English Twitter.

But it’s really hard, because sometimes when you translate English tweets into Japanese or any other language, they become a whole different thing.

So I’m trying to explain the joke to the management team. Like, “No, it’s not that serious. I don’t really wanna die. Like, it’s not what I meant in the tweet.”

At first, my management team had a hard time understanding my English tweets, but now, they’re kinda laid back about it. Just kind of let me go [do my own thing] – or maybe they’ve given up on me, I don’t know. (laughs)

What’s your biggest anime hot take?

I would say just because it has a lot of action doesn’t mean it’s good, and just because the art is bad doesn’t mean it’s a bad anime.

I feel like nowadays, people think that if there’s, like, this really cinematic sword scene, or, like, a lot of action, that in itself makes an anime great.

But honestly, the story behind it is what makes anime amazing.

So I feel like there are a lot of underrated anime out there that people kind of just throw away from the first episode, just because the art style isn’t as good as the art style from the big anime studios, and it’s such a bummer.

CNA Lifestyle was in Japan at the invitation of Crunchyroll.

Source: CNA/hq

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