For years, My Hero Academia framed Izuku Midoriya and Tomura Shigaraki as two sides of the same conflict. Deku carried the hope of hero society, while Shigaraki became the threat that could tear it apart. After nearly a decade of watching them clash, it’s easy to describe them as hero and villain before anything else. However, when Daiki Yamashita and Koki Uchiyama spoke with me during Anime Expo 2026, they didn’t really talk about them that way.
Yamashita-san, who voices Deku, and Uchiyama-san, who voices Shigaraki, kept returning to the people their characters met and how those encounters shaped everything that followed. Their answers didn’t make Deku and Shigaraki feel like opposites. They made them feel dangerously close to each other.
Hero and Villain Don’t Feel So Different Anymore
When we asked how they see the connection between Deku and Shigaraki after performing these roles for so long, Yamashita-san didn’t start with ideology or rivalry. He started with circumstance. “If their encounters had been different, Deku could have become someone like Shigaraki,” Yamashita-san said. “Thinking about that made me feel again how harsh that society is.”
Uchiyama-san reached almost the same idea from Shigaraki’s side. In the Final Season, he said he was shocked to learn that Shigaraki’s Decay quirk wasn’t something he was born with, but something given to him later. “In other words, he wasn’t born a villain,” Uchiyama-san said. “If All For One hadn’t interfered, he may have had a completely different life.”
Hearing those answers together makes the line between them feel much thinner. Deku and Shigaraki still make different choices, and the story never treats them as interchangeable, but both actors described lives changed by who reached them first. Deku met All Might. Shigaraki met All For One. One encounter opened a path forward, while the other narrowed a life until destruction felt inevitable.
Encounters Changed Everything
Yamashita-san never spoke about Deku’s future like it was guaranteed. He spoke about one conversation. “Deku was lucky to meet All Might,” he said. “Because of that miraculous moment, and because he found the courage to ask, ‘Can I become a hero?’ he was able to enroll in U.A. High School. I think encounters and courage are very important.”
After ten years with the character, Yamashita-san still returns to that conversation. For him, Deku’s story begins with the courage to ask one question and someone willing to answer it.
Uchiyama-san’s reflection gives Shigaraki’s side of the story its own sadness. The revelation that Shigaraki wasn’t born with Decay reframes him as someone whose life was redirected before he had the chance to understand it. Rather than describing Shigaraki only through his violence, Uchiyama-san focused on the life that might have existed without All For One’s involvement.
What stood out was how naturally both actors arrived at the same idea. Yamashita-san talked about the person who opened a path for Deku. Uchiyama-san reflected on the person who redirected Shigaraki’s life.
Neither Actor Saw the Whole Story Coming
Yamashita-san and Uchiyama-san also had very different relationships with their characters over the past decade. For Yamashita-san, Deku’s foundation stayed consistent from the beginning. The circumstances changed, the battles grew heavier, and One For All became a larger burden, but Deku’s core never moved. “At his root, Deku hasn’t changed,” Yamashita-san said. “His respect for heroes and his respect for people have never wavered.”
That stability gave Yamashita-san something solid to hold onto as Deku grew from a nervous boy chasing heroism into someone carrying the full weight of saving others. “Because his foundation was always so solid, I never felt uncertain while playing him,” he said. “I always faced him directly and moved forward with him.”
Uchiyama-san had to build Shigaraki differently. Since the anime was produced alongside the ongoing manga, he didn’t know Shigaraki’s full past when the series began. “During the first season, I didn’t know he had that kind of past,” Uchiyama-san said. Instead of performing from a complete map of the character, he discovered Shigaraki season by season. “Every season, I would learn, ‘This is who Shigaraki is this time,’” he said. “I kept taking on those challenges season by season, and now it feels like we finally reached the Final Season.”
Uchiyama-san’s description mirrors the way he experienced the role himself. Every season revealed another side of Shigaraki, so each recording became an opportunity to adjust his performance rather than repeat what came before. Looking back, he described the role as a series of new challenges that eventually led him to the Final Season.
Ten Years Later, They Still Approach Them Differently
Watching the live reading during the Anime Expo 2026 panel, one thing immediately stood out. The moment the scene began, both actors slipped back into their characters without hesitation. When we asked if Deku and Shigaraki had become part of them after all these years, Yamashita-san pointed first to the skill of voice acting itself. “Voice actors, especially Japanese voice actors, often play many different characters,” he said. “Being able to switch into a character quickly is an important skill.”
Deku, though, sits a little differently for him after ten years. “If someone tells me to do Deku, I can immediately bring out all kinds of lines,” Yamashita-san said. “It feels like he’s already inside me.”
Uchiyama-san’s answer had a different kind of honesty. The scene performed at the panel was one he wanted to approach in a new way, and even after all this time, he still found it difficult. He said he practiced it repeatedly in his hotel the day before, just as he had found it challenging during the original recording.
Watching both of them on stage made those different approaches easy to appreciate. Yamashita-san slipped into Deku almost instantly, speaking about the role like an old friend. Uchiyama-san admitted he still spent time practicing the scene in his hotel the night before because he wanted to approach it differently. Neither answer felt more impressive than the other. They simply reflected two very different relationships with characters they’ve carried for nearly ten years.
After ten years, neither actor reduced Deku and Shigaraki to symbols of heroism and villainy. Yamashita-san spoke about one meeting that gave Deku a future. Uchiyama-san reflected on another force that took Shigaraki’s away. By the end of the conversation, the two characters didn’t feel like destiny pulling in opposite directions. They felt like proof that one encounter can change everything.
