Veteran 'One Piece' and 'Dragon Ball Z' Actor Dead at 56
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For nearly three decades, Mike McFarland helped shape how English-speaking audiences experienced some of anime’s most important series. His unmistakable performances can be heard throughout Dragon Ball, One Piece, Attack on Titan, and Fullmetal Alchemist, while his work behind the microphone influenced an entire generation of English dubs. To millions of fans, however, he will always be the voice of Master Roshi.
McFarland began voicing the legendary Dragon Ball character in the late 1990s and continued playing him across television series, movies, and video games. He also brought Buggy the Clown to life in the English dub of One Piece, long before the pirate became one of the franchise’s most unexpectedly important characters. Those two roles alone made McFarland one of the most recognizable voices in anime.
McFarland has died at the age of 56 following a battle with glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer. He reportedly died Wednesday at a Dallas care facility, surrounded by friends and family. McFarland was diagnosed with glioblastoma in August 2025 after undergoing surgeries for a brain tumor earlier that year.
Mike McFarland Helped Define an Entire Era of Anime
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- Release Date
- October 20, 1999
- Network
- Fuji TV
- Directors
- Hiroaki Miyamoto, Konosuke Uda, Junji Shimizu, Satoshi Itō, Munehisa Sakai, Katsumi Tokoro, Yutaka Nakajima, Yoshihiro Ueda, Kenichi Takeshita, Yoko Ikeda, Ryota Nakamura, Hiroyuki Kakudou, Takahiro Imamura, Toshihiro Maeya, Yûji Endô, Nozomu Shishido, Hidehiko Kadota, Sumio Watanabe, Harume Kosaka, Yasuhiro Tanabe, Yukihiko Nakao, Keisuke Onishi, Junichi Fujise, Hiroyuki Satou
- Writers
- Jin Tanaka, Akiko Inoue, Junki Takegami, Shinzo Fujita, Shouji Yonemura, Yoshiyuki Suga, Atsuhiro Tomioka, Hirohiko Uesaka, Michiru Shimada, Isao Murayama, Takuya Masumoto, Yoichi Takahashi, Momoka Toyoda
- Franchise(s)
- One Piece
-
Mayumi Tanaka
Monkey D. Luffy (voice)
-
Kazuya Nakai
Roronoa Zoro (voice)
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.