The Hollywood Actors Strike continues, which means union member performers still can’t promote their work. The Writers Guild of America Strike is over, though, so it’s back to work behind-the-scenes on various upcoming series and films. Among them, is Season 2 of One Piece, Netflix’s live-action version of Eiichiro Oda’s globally popular manga and anime.

We fell in love with Season 1 of the pirate adventure – for multiple reasons – and on the back of that, we were recently privileged to talk to Cape Town-based stunt performer, Shaun Verth, a member of the show’s core stunt team when the debut season shot in South Africa.

Verth’s parkour and free running skills, trained from the age of 16, have led to a career in film, and then stunt work. He’s worked on the likes of Warrior (also filmed in the Western Cape), Maze Runner: The Death Cure, plus Tom Cruise’s The Mummy, and also makes regular trips to India for Bollywood projects. We chatted to Verth about day-to-day on the One Piece set, how his love of anime paid off, things that didn’t (and did) make it into Season 1, and what makes the series so special.

With One Piece what was the timeline like? How long before filming did you start preparing?

I was in India with the One Piece stunt coordinator when we got the job. The assistant coordinators and choreographers were already with the Luffy and Nami stunt doubles back in Cape Town prepping and they started prep in November (2021) already.

We came back to South Africa in November – December and we started prepping there, taking a hiatus during Christmas. Then things kicked off again in mid Jan, and we went and didn’t stop till September (2022). It was a super long project.

How big was the stunt team on One Piece Season 1?

We had a stunt rigging team, which is standard, led by this insane rigger, Leo. Then you’ve got essentially the team that would get to work – the stunt coordinator, two assistant coordinators, two fight choreographers and then the core team. These are the people that will just be working every single day five days a week.

It was roughly about five of us in the core team and they brought on an additional four later because the load was just insane. So yeah, I guess there ended up being around 15 people in the permanent team when it came to designing and all that jazz.

And then we brought in dailies when it came to the big sequences, like with the fishmen in Arlong Park. On these days there would be more like 20 people, but they would still double up as different characters. It’s just the name of the game.

What was your day-to-day on set like?

From my perspective and the fight choreographer’s perspective, we didn’t really go to set that much. I’m not saying that we didn’t go to set, but the majority of our days we were sitting in our stunt area and we’d either be training actors, designing fights, or coming up with concepts.

It was a busy, busy day and we were just constantly doing that every single day until one of us was either doubling on the show, or going to assist with the actors. Because, from the horse’s mouth, the majority of the actors did a lot of their own stunts, I’d say 90%. I think if anything, the doubles on the show would take the hard hits and that is purely based on a fact you can’t hit actors, but the actors full on did their own stunts. We were occasionally on set just looking after them.

What was it like working with the actors? Did anyone particularly impress you whether through hard work or natural aptitude?

Look, these actors committed to their roles and I think anybody anywhere could see they were cast perfectly. And I couldn’t agree more.

I mean, Mackenyu who plays Zoro, he comes from a background of extremely good martial arts. He did Rurouni Kenshin and if anybody loves live-action anime, that’s really good. And he did that. So the sword work was on point.

As for someone who stood out the most, I’m not putting any one favourite above the rest because Iñaki Godoy is Luffy reincarnate, Emily Rudd as Nami is phenomenal – what an absolute down to earth person – and Jacob Romero (playing Usopp) is the most chilled guy you’d ever meet.

But I have to talk about Taz Skylar, who plays Sanji. I’ve never seen an actor commit so much to a role to make the fans happy. This man had come into our training tent, I’m not even joking, probably a minimum of five hours a day training kicks so he could be the perfect Sanji. Then after the kicks he’d go and take a professional cooking course. He did not stop for the full nine months we were there. It was madness.

You’re a One Piece fan. Did that help you during the project?

Yes, it paid off tremendously.

A lot of the choreography was put my way because I was such a big One Piece fan. I knew a lot about the characters, and if you know anything about One Piece you know it’s very character driven and full of nuances. So the choreographers and my boss would come up to me and ask me certain things about the show because I was pretty much the only one who had watched the anime. So I assisted with the main fight choreography.

How much freedom did you have when it came to choreographing the fight scenes? Were you trying to replicate the source material?

So a lot of things we kept grounded per say, but there were also certain things that we felt needed to stick true to the anime, and one of them was the Zoro versus Mihawk fight. It’s a very pivotal moment and the catalyst to Zoro becoming the greatest swordsman ever. So with that fight so we actually took the One Piece anime and decided were going to do it shot for shot essentially, throwing in a little fancy camera move, and yeah we did that and they shot the majority of what we proposed in our visualization as well.

With regards to other things as well we did get a lot of free rein when it came to Luffy. Being rubber, he’s very dynamic, and we ended up with an amazing stunt double. Shout out to Cameron Groep, with his phenomenal parkour, free running and tricking, and we wanted to give Luffy those aspects.

With Luffy it was also interesting to witness the deeper thought processes that go into live-action adaptations. An example is that one of Luffy’s traits is that he is immune to round bullets because he’s made of rubber. So in our choreography, when he gets shot, the bullet gets sucked into him and then he shoots it back out, and you see it in the opening scene on Alvida’s ship. In meetings, from the Netflix side of things, they didn’t want to put that in initially because it eradicates the danger for Luffy in the eyes of casual, non-anime viewers, who see a gun and it’s like the most lethal thing. They wanted to take that out early on, but I saw in the final edit they kept the bullet thing in. Still, it was nice to see that level of thinking up close.

Did you have to get approvals from One Piece creator Eiichiro Oda, who has been famously hands-on with this adaptation?

Personally, not the stunts so much, but I think more story wise. We had incredible writers on the show. One of them, Matt Owens, was specifically entrusted by Oda to do the writing so we did our thing based on the scripts which came from massive fans Matt and Steven (Maeda), and there wasn’t much that we needed to change.

I think there were some final corrections at the end but again, Odo stated he would not release something unless he was happy. He made the perfect changes and honestly it didn’t deviate too much from what we originally saw and created.

Who was your favourite character to coordinate fight scenes for?

Oh, well I’m extremely biased as it’s my favourite character besides Trafalgar Law. It’s Mihawk, just because of how mysterious and powerful he is, and then I got to work with Steven (John Ward) – what a gem of a human being – and train him. With Mihawk, his movements aren’t so intricate in a sense but it’s his mannerisms that are important, and so it was more about the acting and his nonchalant nature that I really wanted to convey.

There was also a Sham and Buchi fight versus Zoro inside the mansion, and that was probably the most fun to choreograph just because there was a lot of free rein.

Was there something specific you wanted to include in a scene but couldn’t?

I wanted to add Sanji’s classic handstand spinning kick but we just didn’t have the time to do it. The fishman sequence was the perfect opportunity to include it but we could not get it in.

What are you most looking forward to in One Piece Season 2? Or the series future in general?

In the final episode’s credits (in Season One) there’s a certain character that comes into play, and I’ve been running through designs for this character so much. It’s a certain Marine that people tend to like so I’m going to let my imagination play there; we’ll see what we can do with that. I’m as excited as any fan to see what we can make and do with Season 2.

Any final stories or anecdotes from the set you’d like to share?

It’s difficult to pinpoint one thing. I think if you want to know what actually stood out the most out of any other job is probably the level of collaboration, and passion that everybody put in. You feel that passion; that love for the show, the nostalgia for the source material, and that was something very unique that I hadn’t seen before in another production. And I hope to see it again for Season 2.

It’s also a “difficult to explain unless you were there” kind of thing but it was beautiful. I mean from the set designs – places like Baratie – these are all practical sets. Maybe your sky and your background was CGI but a lot of it was practical, and stepping into that is a whole new world. I actually hope they open up those studios for a tour for the fans one day because it’s phenomenal actually.