Griffin Burns, the voice actor behind Childe who keeps playing men with two faces

Griffin Burns

Photo: Gage Skidmore / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	October 26, 1987 Hanover, Pennsylvania, United States
Occupation	Voice actor and musician
Known for	The Addams Family 2
Awards	Behind The Voice Actors

In the English dubs of the Case Closed films, the teenage detective Shinichi Kudo and the gentleman thief Kaito Kid share a face, a running joke of the franchise. They also share a voice. Griffin Burns has played both, matching the Japanese casting, where the same actor, Kappei Yamaguchi, speaks for the boy who chases the thief and for the thief himself. It is a fitting job for a performer whose career keeps handing him men who are two people at once.

The best known of those doubles arrived without a name in the credits. When Genshin Impact launched, English-speaking players met the Fatui Harbinger who calls himself Childe and answers to Tartaglia, a cheerful young soldier with a habit of picking fights he enjoys too much, and nobody outside the studio could say who was speaking. miHoYo revealed its English cast weeks later, one tweet at a time. Burns was on the list, and a working Los Angeles voice actor became a fixture of convention stages whose voice is heard by far more people than would recognise him in the queue for coffee.

Griffin William Burns was born in October 1987 in Hanover, a small borough in York County, Pennsylvania, a long way from the Los Angeles studios where he works today. His voice was never only an acting instrument. He is the songwriter and lead singer of New New Girlfriend, an alternative pop-rock band he fronts with Kylen Deporter, whose tracks include “The Real Thing” and “Uh-Oh!” and have passed two million streams.

The dubbing work came first in volume. In 2017 the Behind The Voice Actors awards named him Breakthrough Voice Actor of the Year in the anime dub category, and around the same time Netflix released Devilman Crybaby, Masaaki Yuasa’s feverish adaptation of Go Nagai’s manga. Burns voiced Akira Fudo, the gentle, tearful teenager who fuses with a demon and spends the series trying to stay the boy he was. In JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind he took Vinegar Doppio, the timid errand runner who turns out to be the second personality of the criminal boss Diavolo. Both were split selves, and both earned him a reputation for finding the soft person inside the monstrous one.

The list kept growing, past 150 titles by the count of his convention organisers. He is Muichiro Tokito, the absent-minded Mist Hashira of Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, a boy whose lost memories have cut him off from his own past. He is Tadano, the dreamy tech entrepreneur who courts Retsuko in Aggretsuko, and Canute, the frightened prince who hardens into a king, in the Netflix dub of Vinland Saga. Younger audiences know a different Burns: Prank, the crash-dummy henchman in Batwheels, Ken in Barbie Mysteries, a small part in The Addams Family 2.

That breadth comes with a condition built into the job. A dub actor seldom owns his most famous work. Childe belongs to HoYoverse, and in Japanese he is Ryohei Kimura’s. Canute exists twice in English: the Crunchyroll release gives him Jessie James Grelle’s voice, so for a large part of the English-speaking audience the character Burns built sounds like somebody else. Anime fandom still argues over whether a dub is a performance or a substitute, and Burns’s reputation was made in exactly the corner of the culture where that argument is loudest. His answer, so far, has been volume and consistency rather than manifestos.

2026 moved him closer to the mainstream. In Stranger Things: Tales from ’85, the animated Netflix spin-off set in Hawkins in the winter between the second and third seasons of the live-action show, Burns voices Jonathan Byers, the older brother Charlie Heaton plays on screen. The series opens with Will receiving a new mixtape from his brother, and the brother is Burns. The first season premiered on April 23, 2026, and a second followed on September 17. In July, Hulu’s English dub of the second season of Mission: Yozakura Family arrived with Burns as the lead, Taiyo Asano, opposite Abby Trott.

Then Genshin Impact asked him for something different. For the game’s sixth anniversary, HOYO-MiX released “A Letter from the Wind”, a theme composed by Xin Zhao and recorded in four languages, and the English version is sung by Burns. For once the game wanted the singer from New New Girlfriend rather than the Harbinger, and the voice players know from Childe’s battles was asked to carry a song instead.

The next double is already scheduled. Spike Chunsoft has cast him as Sakutaro Higashi, a new character introduced in the Slayhem mode of Danganronpa 2×2, voiced in Japanese by Natsuki Hanae, which launches on January 14, 2027. Another student dragged into a class trial, another face drawn by somebody else, and the same voice doing the work underneath.

Tags: anime, Stranger Things, voice actors, Genshin Impact, Demon Slayer, Griffin Burns

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