Anya & Yor’s English Voice Actors Break Down Their Spy x Family CODE: White Arcs
The adorable and telepathic Anya and her secretive family are finally hitting the big screen in Spy X Family CODE: White. It’s a fantastic adventure for the whole family that releases in North American theaters April 19, 2024. The amazingly talented voice actors Megan Shipman (Anya) and Natalie Van Sistine (Yor) chatted with Screen Rant about their iconic roles, the film, and their experiences in the voice acting industry.
While the Spy X Family anime currently has two seasons adapted from the manga by Tatsuya Endo, the film is a stand-alone story that won’t require prior knowledge to enjoy. Characters like the young telepathic Anya and her mother, the civil servant by day and world-class assassin at night, Yor, get fantastic introductions in the film’s first sections.
The voice actors behind Anya and Yor’s English dub, Megan Shipman (Anya) and Natalie Van Sistine (Yor), are no strangers in providing memorable voices across many mediums. While their performances in series like Attack on Titan, Trigun Stampede, Vinland Saga, and My Hero Academia are phenomenal, their work with Spy X Family has helped make the series an excellent choice for first-time anime watchers and the Code: White film is a great place to start.
Megan, Anya’s relationship with her dog Bond is a major highlight in Spy X Family, do you have any dogs of your own that may have helped inspire how Anya and Bond interact?
Megan Shipman: Yeah, I have my own dog named Jamie. He’s adorable. He’s half Chihuajua, half Schnauzer. He looks more like a Schnauzer, but he has a very big personality and quite the attitude. And he’s adorable, and I love him. I just love dogs. So I’m a dog person.
Natalie Van Sistine: I think they made Bond extra fluffy for the movie. The whole time he’s on screen I was like “DOG!”
Megan: I wanted to hold him!
While recording scenes between Anya and Bond, do you and his voice actor (and series script o get that dynamic?
Yor’s character goes through a large range of emotions throughout Spy X Family CODE: White. Which of her cadences do you have the most fun recording? When she’s really direct and serious? Or when she’s frantically ranting about her insecurities in her head?
Natalie Van Sistine: I think the easiest and most natural, oddly enough, is when she’s more confident, it sits a little closer to where my voice naturally sits. It’s easier to keep that level and be like, “I’m gonna do a murder.” You know, like a normal person, a normal human mom. I do really love when she has the outrageous internal monologues. They go from “What if?” to like “Ahhh! I’m gonna lose it, and lose everything!” It’s pretty relatable.
Megan’s performance as Anya reminds me of the innocent and charming performances from Rugrats, one of my favorite shows to watch as a kid. What is your process in crafting Anya’s iconic voice and what inspirations helped you prepare for it?
Megan Shipman: A lot of it was thanks to another actress in the movie who plays Becky and her name’s Danny Chambers. I had heard Danny years ago in a different anime voicing a kid. She has this amazing, natural [ability to] speak like a kid, with pauses like when kids are thinking through what they’re going to say because their brains are learning and processing words and things. And I remember hearing her do that little kid voice and being like, “Oh, I want to voice a kid like that, to do a realistic kid voice.” I was so inspired by that.
It’s really ironic that we’re both playing children in this show. She plays [Becky], who is a nice, posh, well-educated child and I have to be like the actual child. When I saw this [opportunity] I was like, “now’s my chance to use that truly goofy stream of consciousness kid voice,” I remember thinking that when I auditioned. When I auditioned, I could tell she was really funny, and there for comedic effect, along with just being adorable. And I remember seeing her face in manga and on the internet with little sprinkles of it here and there. And so I was like, “Okay, she’s like this kid. She’s kind of funny. She’s off the wall a little bit. But she’s still like a normal kid,” and I think that’s where the funniness comes from is her just being a normal kid, and being a little extreme, like a kid who doesn’t get a candy bar when they go to the store, and then the world’s over, you know something like that.
Becoming Anya and encapsulating that was really fun. Because I also get to base it off of what the Japanese version has done, and so you get that basis as well. And you’re like, “This is so cool. I see the vision here, and I can see what’s going on.” A lot of the tone and the tambor came from what they did in the Japanese version. Inflections and mannerisms came from me being inspired by colleagues, and then also thinking about what does a kid do? Because she is just a kid, and that’s kind of the secret sa