Iñaki Godoy, the One Piece Luffy who has bet his early twenties on a single pirate

Iñaki Godoy

Photo: Ferfive / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	August 25, 2003 Mexico City, Mexico
Occupation	Actor
Known for	MexZombies

Nobody asked Iñaki Godoy to learn Japanese. Netflix had already given him Monkey D. Luffy, the rubber-limbed captain at the centre of One Piece, and Eiichiro Oda, the manga’s creator, had said that the moment he saw the young Mexican actor he knew he had found his Luffy. Godoy started lessons anyway, because he wanted Japanese fans to be able to talk to Luffy directly. He went on to interview Oda in Japanese on the show’s set in Cape Town and to address the crowd at One Piece Day in Tokyo without falling back on English or Spanish. It is the gesture of an actor who has decided that one character is worth a large share of his youth, and the question his career now asks is what that bet will buy him when the voyage ends.

Godoy was born and raised in Mexico City; his sister Mia arrived a month after his first birthday. He was, by his own account, hopeless at sport, so his mother enrolled him at four in Stage Company, a children’s musical-theatre school based at the Teatro Libanés. A school staging of Alice in Wonderland went over well enough to make him take acting seriously, and at nine he told his mother he wanted to do it for a living. A teacher steered the family towards casting calls, and the first audition he won brought a small part on a programme called Cocina de hacienda.

His summers added a second school. At Pali Adventures, a camp in Southern California with an acting and film programme, he learned to write and direct as well as perform, and he made his own short films, Blinded and Casi Arte, handling the script, camera and edit himself. The boy who would become the face of a global franchise started out as someone who liked to build the whole thing.

The first sizeable job came in 2016, at thirteen, when Telemundo cast him as Amadeo, known as “El Gato”, in La querida del Centauro, a part he kept into the show’s second season. Smaller roles followed in Blue Demon, Por la Máscara, Sin miedo a la verdad and Los elegidos. Then Carlos Armella gave him his first lead and his film debut. In ¡Ánimo juventud! Godoy plays Pedro, a teenager who drives the adults around him to distraction by inventing a language only he understands. He had to learn that language properly, a structured invention shared only with the director, who corrected his pronunciation as they shot. Armella described the film as an “anti coming of age”, a story about a young man who keeps his spirit as he grows up. It competed at the Morelia International Film Festival before opening in Mexican cinemas in September 2021, and seen from here it reads like a rehearsal for everything that followed.

Netflix’s Mexican thriller Who Killed Sara? cast him as Bruno Lazcano, a stepson pulled unwillingly into his family’s crimes, across its first two seasons. His first English-language production, The Imperfects, made him one of three leads in a superhero drama, playing Juan Ruiz, a comic-book artist turned into a chupacabra by experimental gene therapy. Netflix cancelled it two months after its September 2022 premiere, after ten episodes. The same year he led two Mexican genre films, Chava Cartas’s horror comedy MexZombies, which travelled to Toronto After Dark, and Humberto Hinojosa Ozcariz’s No abras la puerta.

By then the role that would define him had already been announced. Netflix named him as Luffy in November 2021, when he was eighteen, and the live-action One Piece arrived in August 2023 carrying the weight of a long run of failed anime adaptations. Critics who expected another one singled out its lead instead; reviewers quoted in Rotten Tomatoes’ first round-up called him a pitch-perfect lead. The role asks for something hard to fake: a hero whose main weapon is unbroken optimism, inside a body that visual effects stretch like rubber. Godoy plays the grin straight, never winking at the audience, and that is why it works.

The praise has been close to unanimous, and that is part of the problem. Luffy lives in a single register of cheer, appetite and loyalty, the series shoots for months at a time in South Africa, and two and a half years separated its first season from its second. Outside the Straw Hats, his record since the casting is thin: the only other English-language role he has played is a series cancelled after ten episodes, and the range he showed in ¡Ánimo juventud! belongs to the time before the hat. Audiences have yet to see what he does with a part built on doubt, menace or stillness. Long franchises set this trap for the actor at their centre, and he walked into this one at eighteen.

The second season, subtitled Into the Grand Line, reached Netflix on 10 March 2026 and drew warmer notices than the first, with several reviewers praising how Godoy handled its emotional scenes. Before it was even released, the third was already in production: The Battle of Alabasta was shot in Cape Town between 24 November 2025 and 30 June 2026, with Joe Manganiello’s Crocodile, teased at the end of the second season, as its villain. Netflix has set it for 2027, without a date. On 29 September 2026 he voiced Luffy again for LEGO One Piece, a two-part animated special retelling the first two seasons in bricks, and he has spent the year on the convention circuit, from Comic Con Astana in August to San Diego Comic-Con Málaga in October.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gzigc5NurEs

Off set, he has used his visibility for his sister, who has alopecia areata, an autoimmune condition that causes hair loss, publicly supporting the Children’s Alopecia Project in Mexico to raise awareness of children who live with it. When the first season wrapped he spent 80 days sailing the Caribbean, learning to cook and to navigate by compass and constellations, an episode that sounds like fan fiction for a man who plays a sea captain.

Alabasta is the arc in which the story turns from island-hopping adventure to a rebellion that threatens to tear a kingdom apart, and it will ask Luffy to carry a crisis much larger than his crew. That is the closest thing to a new register the franchise can offer him. When The Battle of Alabasta reaches Netflix in 2027, it will show how much of the bet Godoy made at eighteen has paid off, and how much of the young filmmaker is still waiting below deck.