Mushoku Tensei Season 3, Rudeus and Eris, and more in this exclusive interview.
Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation returned with a new season this summer, and much to the excitement and anticipation of its dedicated fans, the story of Rudeus Greyrat continues as he enters another chapter of his life.
In an exclusive interview with GosuANIME, Madeleine Morris and Lindsay Seidel, the English voice actors behind Rudeus Greyrat and Eris Boreas Greyrat, talk about returning to their roles for Season 3, exploring their characters’ growth, and what fans can look forward to as the series continues.
How does it feel to be back in the recording booth for Mushoku Tensei Season 3?
Seidel: I am so excited to be back, especially because Eris was absent for Season 2, so it feels like it's been forever since I've gotten to record for this show and I can't express how excited I am that Eris is finally back and we get to revisit the character.
Morris: I'm excited because every time I get to step into the booth as Rudy, he's entering a new chapter of his life and that's been fantastic and beautiful to follow and to see him have his first kid.
My baby niece was just born. I don't know, I feel like I have been in pretty lockstep with him for a lot of the kind of canon life events that he has had over the course of this production, so it's been really fun to be back.
Without getting into spoilers, is there a side of your character that you’re particularly excited for viewers to see in Season 3?
Seidel: I'm just excited to continue to watch Eris's journey unfold, see her continue to get stronger, see her mature some more and get to see some different sides to her.
Morris: We are going to get to see the world expand again, which will be exciting because we've had this nice little slice-of-life, family-centric moment. And I'm very much looking forward to doing a little more adventuring.
Eris has gone through a lot of development during the timeline in Season 2 that we didn’t actually get to see on screen until Season 3 aired. What was your approach to portraying this new version of Eris when you had to convey so much of that growth through her performance?
Seidel: My favourite types of characters to voice are characters like Eris that get to go through a whole long journey of character development, where the show allows for time for the character to develop and mature and change. And as far as preparation goes, I largely rely on the director for the English dub.
His name is Jeremy Inman. He's wonderful. I love working with him.
And he helped guide me once we got together to work on the first episode of Season 3. And he kind of helped fill me in, reminded me kind of where things left off with Eris. And yeah, he was really helpful in helping me get into the zone again and how to kind of approach this. It's just been great getting to revisit the character again.
Rudeus has gone through so many different experiences throughout the anime. What part of his development has been the most interesting for you to portray?
Morris: I am always going to have a real soft spot and very special place in my heart for Rudy as we found him at the beginning of Season 1 as a little boy. I think Season 1 started in early 2021, so early COVID.
I was going through it. I was thinking about quitting acting. And Rudy was the first character that I booked that started to kind of drag me out of that, kind of by accident. I spent the first entire two episodes of Season 1 being like, I can still quit. I can still quit. I can still quit. I can still quit. And I didn't.
But so much of the growth and the healing and the development that Rudy goes through in Season 1 as I was going through my own thing and spending a lot of time in therapy doing my inner child work and healing my inner child and watching him heal his outer child was really exciting and fun and refreshing. And that's always going to be, I think, my favourite part of the show, [is] where we started. Right back where we started.
After spending so much time with these characters, is there anything about Rudeus/Eris that you understand differently now compared to when you first started voicing them?
Morris: I get the sense that my understanding of Rudy evolves with Rudy's understanding of Rudy. Because I think this story is very much him figuring himself out and learning to understand his own impulses and his reactions to things. I think my understanding of him has developed with his own.
Seidel: I'm getting to see a lot more of the motivations behind why Eris acts the way she does. She starts to confront some of her own weaknesses and become a little more self-aware of those things, which has been helpful for me when it comes to portraying her–to dive a little deeper into why she acts the way that she does and why she has acted the way that she has acted and what drives her to be stronger and all those things.
It's been really neat getting to start to dive deeper into those things and get to explore a little bit more of the inner workings of Eris.
What's something about your character that you think is easy to misunderstand if you only look at what they say or do on the surface?
Morris: I will preface this by saying I love a lot of problematic media and complex, complicated characters like Rudeus are some of my favourites. And I think with him and with a lot of the other things that I love, like Bojack Horseman, Disco Elysium, like complicated themes in media, I think it's really easy to see something that deals with these themes and go, I don't want to engage with that at all.
I think it's easy to shut down either out of a kind of a knee-jerk fear or out of an assumption that this won't be for me, I don't want to have that discussion. And both of those reactions are okay, but I do also try to always encourage people to question why they've had that reaction and whether or not that engaging with this discussion is something that they might actually find interesting. And I find that applies to a lot of the themes of this show.
Seidel: I also just think that the most interesting shows and characters out there are the ones that are complex and problematic because I think that that's more true to how real people are. Nobody is perfect. We all are flawed and have things that we need to work on, and we all have our own journeys that we go through.
So those shows, I think, are a lot more interesting. They make you think more. I think that they can be more inspiring, and cause you to do some more self-reflection.
Morris: I get the sense that Mushoku Tensei deals with these complicated characters much more gently than a lot of media might otherwise allow. These characters suffer consequences, but they aren't punished by the narrative as much as they are. I don't want to say [they are] punishing themselves, but they are encouraged to also look inward, like Rudy has done, like Eris has done.
What do you think makes Rudeus/Eris such an interesting character to follow throughout the series?
Seidel: I mean, definitely the fact that they are flawed characters and that they go through a lot of changes and maturing that happens. To speak more to Eris specifically, since I know her a little bit more intimately, one of the things I really enjoy about her is that she's such a strong female character. I don't always get to play female characters that are that strong and don't take any nonsense from anybody.
And I love that she's strong, not just in her personality. She's very fiery, very sassy. I love that.
But she's also physically very strong, which is always a fun thing as an actor to get to portray a character that is very different from you. I personally would not describe myself in real life as physically very strong. I certainly would not be able to hold my own during a sword fight.
So it's really, really fun to get to portray a character that is such a talented swordswoman.
Morris: Never watching him make the same decision twice. I tend to get really aggravated with a lot of characters in media who never seem to learn their lesson.
And Rudeus, as a character, is very open to going, well, I did that last time and this is what happened. Should I do that again? Is it worth it? I'm going to weigh the pros and cons of this. It's interesting to watch him think.
And that's some of the most fun that I have [with] watching this show. Like doing his very long monologues and everything.
Whether it's me or if it's Ben Phillips doing the internal monologue-ing, it is fun and interesting to watch how this person's brain puts things together. Especially when it leads to different outcomes every time, especially when he's not continuously making the same decision over and over. I think that's really engaging as an audience member and as an actor. I think it's fun to be able to play in those different spaces.
If you could give your character one piece of advice, what would it be?
Seidel: I would tell Eris, and I think she's starting to learn this, it's okay to be more vulnerable. I think that that's one of the things that she has struggled with the most is just letting herself be more vulnerable.
But I think she's getting there.
Morris: I would tell Rudeus, you're allowed to put things down. He's spent so much of his life just adding things to the top of the pile, schlepping all of this on his back.
He's allowed to let things go. You're allowed to let things go. You don't have to let everything you've ever done follow you around forever.
And I think it's okay to take your lessons from the thing and then let the thing go. And I think that's a lot of what's happening in Season 3 as well, especially with his relationship to Eris. I think he's finally starting to let her go, which is gonna be interesting.
What is Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation about?
The Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation anime is based on the popular light novel series written by Rifujin na Magonote and later illustrated by Shirotaka. The series began publishing on the Shōsetsuka Ni Narō website in 2012, and was later published as books in 2013 under Media Factory’s MF Books imprint. A manga adaptation by Yuka Fujikawa also started in 2014 in the Monthly Comic Flapper magazine. The first season of the anime aired in 2021, with the second following in 2024.
Crunchyroll currently streams all three seasons of the anime and describes the show’s premise as:
When a 34-year-old underachiever gets run over by a truck, his story doesn't end there. Reincarnated in a new world as an infant, Rudy will seize every opportunity to live the life he's always wanted. Armed with new friends, some freshly acquired magical abilities, and the courage to do the things he's always dreamed of, he's embarking on an epic adventure—with all of his past experience intact!