For three decades Megumi Ogata's husky voice has been put into boys, most famously Shinji Ikari, and what she does that other actors do not is let the voice give out. She plays fourteen as a sentence that cannot reach its end.
Fi1m perspective
Listen to Shinji Ikari apologise. The word starts, wavers and trails off into nothing, and Megumi Ogata does this again and again across the 26 episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995) without once letting the boy sound cool, or brave, or even sure he has finished speaking. Most actors asked to play a frightened teenager reach for a tremble and hold it. Ogata lets the line collapse and leaves the silence where the rest of it should be.
She came to microphones from musical theatre, and her debut, Kurama in YuYu Hakusho (1992), set the pattern: a woman in her twenties hired to play a young man, on the strength of a low, slightly roughened voice that sits on the border between the two. Haruka Tenoh in Sailor Moon (1993) put her on the other side of that border, as a tomboy who could pass as a boy, and Yukito Tsukishiro and Yue in Cardcaptor Sakura (1998) had her doing two people in one series. Then came Shinji, and Hideaki Anno kept asking her back, through the films and the Rebuild tetralogy that finished in 2021. Five projects with one director, and one boy she has now voiced for longer than he has been alive.
That is the strength and the question. She has said, "I always felt that to truly play a 14-year-old character, I couldn't lose that feeling of being 14 myself," and on the evidence of the series she has not lost it. We found the apologies hard to sit through, not because they are badly done but because they are done too well; there is a point in the early episodes where we wanted to reach into the screen and tell him to stop, and we have not been able to leave the programme alone since. Kotono Mitsuishi and Fumihiko Tachiki are doing fine work around her, but the failing voice in the middle is what makes the rest land.
We should be honest about what we have and have not heard. Our one published review of her work is Evangelion, and the other titles above we know by reputation rather than judgement. The recent lead as Yuta Okkotsu in Jujutsu Kaisen 0 (2021) suggests the industry still wants the same thing from her, an anxious young man with something large behind him, and it is fair to wonder how many of those one voice can carry. She set up her own agency, Breathe Arts, in 2019, which is at least a sign she intends to choose.
If you are coming to Evangelion for the first time, watch it in Japanese. The English dubs are not the point; the point is a woman of thirty finding a boy's voice and then, on purpose, letting it break.
Biography
Megumi Ogata is a Japanese voice actress and singer. She voiced Shinji Ikari in the 1995 series Neon Genesis Evangelion and its subsequent films.
Born on 6 June 1965 in Chiyoda, Tokyo, she attended Tokai University but left without graduating. She began her career in musical theatre before entering voice acting in the early 1990s.
Ogata is also known for roles including Sailor Uranus in Sailor Moon, Kurama in YuYu Hakusho, Yugi Mutou in Yu-Gi-Oh!, and Yuta Okkotsu in Jujutsu Kaisen. She performs as a singer under the name em:óu.
