One Piece showrunner Matt Owens cast Buggy’s Jeff Ward with high expectations, but reveals that he didn’t expect to a reaction to “that extent.”

One Piece showrunner Matt Owens cast Jeff Ward as Buggy the Clown with the expectation that he would be well-received.

Owens reveals to Deadline that while Ward’s success was a foregone conclusion, his sex symbol status was not. “No, not to the extent that he is. I knew Jeff Ward,” Owens said. “We had worked together on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. previously. We’ve always had a great working relationship that blossomed into a very close friendship. I was still on S.H.I.E.L.D. when I first started developing One Piece. We went out to dinner one night and I said, ‘Hey, I’m doing this show. Take a look at it because there’s a character that I really want you for.'”

He added, “So Jeff and I have been talking about Buggy the Clown for years. Jeff is such a phenomenal actor, he brings such depth, such playfulness, such thought to everything that he does, and he killed it. It was so fun seeing him embody that character. So I knew that he would hit, I knew that people would really like him.”

Buggy Undergoes Some Changes for the Live-Action Adaptation

Buggy’s depiction in the One Piece trailer initially worried audiences, who saw the comical yet callous clown turned into a character more aligned with a Western horror. In the manga, Buggy’s running gag is routinely managing to fail upwards, serving as a contrast to the more serious villains in the story. Director Marc Jobst decided to counterbalance Luffy’s positivity with Buggy’s sinister nature in the Netflix adaptation. “So Nami and Zoro are still undecided about Luffy,” Jobst says, “this goofy character who seems a bit simplistic in every way—everything is fine and fantastic and amazing, even creatures like Buggy—and they’re not really providing a huge influx of joy and levity. But because we have Luffy to lend the levity, it allowed Buggy to go darker.”

The decision to change Buggy was a big success in more ways than expected. “To the extent that they [audiences] have,” Owens says, “to the extent that they have been horny for him, that’s new for me, but I’m glad to see him getting the attention that he deserves as an artist.”

Netflix’s adaptation of One Piece was so successful that it wasn’t long before the series was renewed for a second season.

Source: Deadline