Iñaki Godoy doesn’t consider himself a method actor. But after wrapping production on the first season of Netflix’s live-action adaptation of One Piece, in which he stars as protagonist Monkey D. Luffy, the young adventurer who dreams of rising to infamy as the new King of the Pirates, Godoy decided to set sail on a three-month adventure of his own.
For 80 days, Godoy took a crash course in life at sea. While sailing in the Caribbean, flanked by his crew, he learned how to cook and navigate a real ship using compasses and constellations. He braved extreme weather and woke up to sunrises and rainbows. He realized that sometimes it’s better to be happy than to be right. And yes, he showered and cleaned some of the “most horrendous” items known to mankind using ocean water. It’s one of the few practical skills he acquired that hasn’t faded with time back on land.
“I can say that I am not afraid of cleaning anything now. I know that for a fact. I had to go in those bilges, man, and I had to really scrub,” the 2024 New Hollywood honoree says with a wry smile on an early February video call from his childhood bedroom in Mexico City. “I understand that we only get one life and I really want to experience as much of it as I can. That’s also why I want to be a storyteller because it’s a way that makes sense for me to experience life.”
After more than a decade working as a child actor in Spanish-language productions in his native Mexico, Godoy has successfully crossed over into the English-language market with his starring role in One Piece, which premiered last August to critical acclaim and reached the top-10 rankings in 93 countries. Based on the highest-selling Japanese manga in history, by Eiichiro Oda, the action-fantasy series, already renewed for a second season slated to begin filming later this year, follows Luffy and his motley crew of Straw Hat Pirates — Roronoa Zoro (Mackenyu), Nami (Emily Rudd), Usopp (Jacob Romero), and Sanji (Taz Skylar) — who set out on a perilous quest to uncover the fabled treasure known as the “One Piece.”
While remaining faithful to its beloved source material, One Piece bucked a noticeable trend of poor Hollywood adaptations of popular manga and anime series, in no small part due to the committed performance of Godoy. Of the hundreds (if not thousands) of diverse actors who auditioned for the lead role, he was among the select few who could make Oda laugh — and certainly the only one who left a lasting impression.
“I thought the biggest challenge was going to be finding somebody to play Luffy. I didn’t expect to find anyone quite like Iñaki Godoy,” the notoriously private Oda told The New York Times in a rare interview last August. “When I first created Luffy, I drew the most energetic child I could imagine: a normal child on the outside, but not at all normal on the inside. Iñaki was just like the person I drew; he felt absolutely natural.”
That high praise, coming from the meticulous master of the One Piece universe, is as much a testament to Godoy’s natural talent as it is an indicator of the years that the 20-year-old has already spent honing his craft as an artist. When Godoy was four, his stay-at-home mother, sensing his knack for sports had more to do with on-field theatrics than gameplay, signed him up for Stage Company, a local musical theater school, where he regularly performed and helped stage plays as an extracurricular activity. His mother and tax-advisor father nurtured and encouraged his acting aspirations, driving him from audition to audition and accompanying him to all of his professional jobs.
Godoy distinctly remembers the exhilarating feeling of hearing the first laugh come from an audience after he improvised as the Cheshire Cat in an amateur production of Alice in Wonderland — and he has spent his entire career chasing that kind of adrenaline rush. Since landing his first major role at age 11 in La querida del Centauro, a telenovela that ran for two seasons on Telemundo, he has found consistent work across multiple genres: mystery thriller (¿Quién mató a Sara?), crime drama (Sin miedo a la verdad), horror comedy (MexZombies), and even superhero fiction (The Imperfects).
Having grown up on a steady diet of classic American film and television — Phineas and Ferb, SpongeBob SquarePants, and The Simpsons were some of his favorite cartoons — Godoy always harbored dreams of working north of the border, but he admits he had a very different vision of breaking into Hollywood. Like most aspiring directors and screenwriters, he says, “My plan was to go study at film school in the States and start developing my own projects, and that was the way in which I was going to make it here.” But now that his acting career has taken off, Godoy’s been rethinking his approach and commitment to a more formal education, especially since some of his favorite filmmakers never went down that road. School will always be an option, he reasons, but the opportunity to lead a major franchise and learn the ins and outs of working on both sides of the camera is an opportunity of a lifetime that he can’t bring himself to pass up.
In 2021, while shooting the first (and only) season of Netflix’s The Imperfects in Vancouver, Godoy recorded a self-taped audition to play the lead of another undisclosed show, but it wasn’t until he received a callback that he realized he was in the running to play Luffy. “Whenever those really big projects come to you, you want to have a positive attitude, but you also want to be really humble and be like, ‘You know what, man? It’s great to be excited, but the possibility of me landing this role is one in millions,’” he says.
As it turns out, Godoy was that one actor among millions. He was on a flight to New York City with his family when his mother received a WhatsApp message informing her that he had landed the role. His sister, thankfully, had the foresight to record his reaction to the news. Breathing heavily, he recalls telling his family that One Piece was going to change his life. “I knew a lot of people had expectations of it and I was excited. I was also very nervous. It was a big responsibility, but I still don’t think I’ve processed how big it actually is,” Godoy admits, now a couple of years into the experience, his eyes widening with the realization. “I am just an actor, man. I just go do my job. It’s something that I’ve been doing for many years, and the same effort I put into Luffy, I put into every other character that I play.”
Godoy quickly threw himself headfirst into figuring out how he was going to bring Luffy to life. He studied and drew inspiration from the likes of Jim Carrey, Rowan Atkinson, Charlie Chaplin, and Buster Keaton — high-energy actors known for their physical comedy chops. He read the manga and watched the anime series until he was able to glean enough insight to inform his interpretation of the character. He even kept a journal of Luffy’s little idiosyncrasies: his ear-to-ear smile, his emotional intelligence, his physicality, his innate pirate spirit, and, above all, his energetic optimism.
But perhaps the greatest challenge of all was playing a character who is unafraid to share his lofty hopes and dreams with anyone willing to hear him out. In a profession where subtlety of emotion is often taught and rewarded, the actor admits he had to overcome his instincts to play a character who has no fears or insecurities.
“I had to understand that I’m playing a character who is unlike anything I’ve ever played, someone who is extraordinary, someone who has a capability of making people follow him anywhere he goes, someone who follows his dreams, who trusts his gut, and who doesn’t care what others think,” he says. That kind of philosophy has rubbed off on Godoy. “The moving thing about Luffy is that he doesn’t really change too much. Instead, he changes the world around him with his way of being.”
Actors are often asked the age-old question: Where does the character end and the actor begin? While older, more seasoned actors are given the opportunity to play characters that are a dramatic departure from themselves, their younger colleagues are routinely cast in roles that mirror their real-life personalities. So it comes as little surprise that Godoy has a zest for life and an insatiable desire for self-expansion that would rival that of his legendary onscreen counterpart.
A lot has been said and written about how Godoy seems born to play Luffy. (Just take a look at the comments under his “Character Study” segment for Teen Vogue.) Much like the character, in conversation, Godoy speaks quickly and animatedly with his hands and consciously chooses to project an unabashedly upbeat and optimistic outlook on his life and work — but not to the point that it can become ingratiating as the interlocutor. On the Sunday afternoon we speak, he has just gotten back from a weeklong trip to Los Angeles, where he caught up with co-stars Skylar and Rudd. Dressed in a simple black t-shirt and cozy jacket, Godoy wears hexagon-shaped eyeglasses. His naturally curly hair has taken on a life of its own.
His high energy rarely wavers over the course of a two-hour conversation, although there are moments when he’s able to be surprisingly introspective. Hesitant to divulge many details about his personal life, Godoy’s already able to set boundaries and recognize when he needs to take a moment for himself — crucial skills in an unforgiving Hollywood machine.
Given that One Piece debuted in the middle of the writers’ and actors’ strikes in Hollywood, the only direct interaction Godoy and his castmates could have with fans happened through face-to-face interactions, which Godoy believes eased them into the idea of being recognized. Even though he has reached a new level of visibility, he insists he can still lead a pretty normal life. “It doesn’t really make me uncomfortable,” he says. But he does worry about those around him. “If I’m with some friends or family and having to sign stuff and they’re waiting for me there, that’s the only time when it can be a little bit uncomfortable.”
Godoy’s ambivalence about fame stems from his belief that celebrity is “a byproduct,” rather than the end goal of his artistry. Whereas some of his peers may be hyperaware of how they present themselves to the rest of the world, he takes a more relaxed and humanistic approach, welcoming the opportunity to take pictures and sign autographs for fans in public because he views it as an extension of his work. “I understand that Luffy and One Piece and my work mean something to people and I respect that and I take care of the people that love what we do,” he says.
As the new face of the One Piece franchise, Godoy understands that his actions are seen as a reflection of his work, but he is “not scared or nervous of saying the wrong thing or doing something bad” because he feels he has control over his public image. “Yeah, there is a responsibility, but they chose me because they know I can handle it and I know I can handle it,” he says. He’s young and still figuring out the power he has in an industry that can be opaque and confusing. He’s less aware of the inner workings of Hollywood and more focused on doing a good job with the role he has.
But Godoy admits he can feel a kind of career loneliness. He has almost always been the youngest cast member in every production he has worked on. And despite cultivating a strong network of personal and professional relationships back home, he doesn’t have many young actor friends in the business with whom he can discuss the surreal experience of growing up under the spotlight. (He particularly relished the experience of getting to know his fellow New Hollywood honorees during the shoot in Los Angeles and hopes to stay in touch with them.)
Throughout our conversation, Godoy keeps coming back to the same bottom line: At 20, he doesn’t feel like he is entirely deserving of the kind of recognition he has received. He doesn’t feel a need to prove himself to anyone, but nevertheless, he feels like he has more to give and more to offer. “I think I still have a lot of work that I want to do, not just with One Piece, but as an actor,” he says. “I want to earn my place in the history of performing arts. I really want to earn my spot in people’s hearts.”
Godoy knows the fight to be seen and heard in Hollywood won’t be easy. While other minorities have made inroads over the years, Hispanics and Latinos, despite making up 19% of the population in the US, have remained disproportionately underrepresented in film and television, with little progress made over the last 16 years, according to a recent study by USC’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative. As one of the most prominent young Latino actors working today, Godoy is part of a growing wave of talent, including his fellow New Hollywood honoree Ariana Greenblatt, looking to move that needle forward in a substantive way.
Godoy recognizes that he stands on the shoulders of prominent Mexican actors and filmmakers — Eugenio Derbez, Salma Hayek, Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Alfonso Cuarón — who have paved the way for the artists of his generation to expand Hollywood’s perception of the Mexican experience beyond just the narco and downtrodden immigrant stories. “I think that it’s a really good time to be an international actor, and I think that you’ve got to look at it with optimism, and the opportunities that we have now are more than there were many years ago,” he says, pointing out that a Latino actor probably would not have been considered for the lead role in One Piece a decade ago. “There are ways to put your stories out there in so many different mediums. I don’t think that creativity is as limited as it was before.”
For now, Godoy has his sights set on the immediate future. Despite receiving offers from Hollywood and international producers to star in their prospective projects, Godoy insists that he remains wholeheartedly committed to making as many seasons of One Piece as possible. “I can do One Piece for many years and I can be happy, and I don’t need to do a million things,” the actor says. However, he harbors dreams of eventually playing an irredeemable villain one day — “someone who is horrible and who loves being horrible” — because it’s just so different from who he is in real life.
After taking online screenwriting classes, he has begun to put pen to paper on some personal ideas in his spare time. But aside from knowing that his future films will be character-driven and likely self-made vehicles for him to play eccentric characters, he is still determining what stories — and parts of himself — he is willing to share with the rest of the world.
At this point, there’s nothing that Godoy won’t try at least once in his life, regardless of the probability of success (or failure). For instance, he recently saw an ad for a three-month Muay Thai retreat in Thailand, so One Piece fans shouldn’t be surprised if they suddenly find him, after wrapping production on the second season, in another foreign place training for a potential third installment.
The reason for Godoy’s desire to continually broaden his horizons is deceptively existential. “The only thing I know I can do is have a good time because I don’t know why we are here in this world,” he says matter-of-factly, with the air of a boy ready to take on the world. “There is no clear purpose. I just want to experience all the things that are fun and good. I want to do it all.”
Read all of our New Hollywood 2024 stories below:
- Maddie Ziegler on Dance Moms, New Movie Fitting In & Embracing Hollywood
- Ariana Greenblatt on Barbie, Borderlands, Billie Eilish & Child Stardom
- Keith Powers on Uglies, SAG Strikes, Issa Rae & Finding His Own Lane
- Christopher Briney on Reneé Rapp, Summer I Turned Pretty Season 3 & Hollywood Next Moves
- Aida Osman on Rap Sh!t Cancellation, Black Stories in Hollywood & Facing Acting Fears
- Iñaki Godoy on One Piece, Latinos in Hollywood & Living His Best Life
- Megan Suri on Valentine’s Day, Bollywood & Movie Career Post Never Have I Ever
- The SAG Strike Proved How Unions Help Make Young People’s Dreams Viable
Photo Credits
Photographer Josefina Santos
Lighting Director Brian McGuffog
Gaffer Daniel Patrick
Gaffer Kane Katubig
Digitech Isan Monfort
Retouching Digital Area
Stylist Ian McRae
Stylist Assistant Auden Alblooshi
Stylist Assistant Mason Telles
Hair Stylist for Maddie Ziegler, Megan Suri Candice Birns at A-Frame Agency
Hair Stylist for Aida Osman, Ariana Greenblatt Suzette Boozer at A-Frame Agency
Groomer for Chris Briney, Keith Powers, Iñaki Godoy Melissa DeZarate at A-Frame Agency
Makeup Artist for Maddie Ziegler, Megan Suri Miriam Nichterlein at A-Frame Agency
Makeup Artist for Aida Osman, Ariana Greenblatt Rob Rumsey at A-Frame Agency
HMU Assistant Jenna Lee
Manicurist Rachel Messick
Prop Stylist Annika Fischer
Prop Assistant Elvis Barlow-Smith
Production Hyperion
Design Director Emily Zirimis
Designer Liz Coulbourn
Visual Editor Bea Oyster
Sr. Fashion Editor Tchesmeni Leonard
Associate Fashion Editor Kat Thomas
Assistant Fashion Editor Tascha Berkowitz
Video Credits
Director/Producer Logan Tsugita
Director/Producer Catherine Mhloyi
Social Video Director/Producer Ali Farooqui
Director of Creative Dev Mi-Anne Chan
Camera Op Nick Massey Ga
Social Cover Video Editor Lindsey Fink
Site Video Header Editor Crystal Waterton
Editorial Credits
Editor-in-Chief Versha Sharma
Executive Editor Danielle Kwateng
Features Director Brittney McNamara
Talent Director Eugene Shevertalov
Senior Culture Editor P. Claire Dodson
Entertainment News Editor Kaitlyn McNab
Contributing Editor Alyssa Hardy
Associate Director of Audience Development and Analytics Mandy Velez Tatti
Sr. Social Media Manager Honestine Fraser
Social Media Manager Jillian Selzer
Copy Editors Dawn Rebecky and Leslie Lipton
Research Editor Cristina Sada
