Learning Who Voices Hisoka in ‘Hunter x Hunter’ Broke My Brain

Hisoka from Hunter x Hunter is one creepy clown, so I couldn’t believe my eyes when I found out who his English and Japanese voice actors are.

It’s not that these voice actors haven’t voiced villains before. But the popular characters they’ve voiced sound nothing like Hisoka. Unless you count Tooru Oikawa from Haikyuu!! who was voiced by Daisuke Namikawa, the Japanese voice actor for Hisoka. Nobody has crushed the dreams of Team Karasuno better than Aoba Johsai’s team captain, Oikawa. But jokes aside, most Haikyuu!! and Hunter x Hunter fans like myself wouldn’t think that Oikawa and Hisoka share the same voice actor.

Oikawa almost hit one of his teammates as a kid. Meanwhile, Hisoka wants to kill Gon, a literal child. Knowing that Daisuke Namikawa voiced them both is proof of his range, because these two are nothing alike—in personality or voice.

My brain stopped working when I found out about Hisoka’s Japanese voice actor, but it exploded when I found out about Hisoka’s English voice actor. As a Genshin Impact player, I wasn’t prepared for to learn that Keith Silverstein, the English voice actor of Zhongli, is also Hisoka’s voice actor.

How did Silverstein go from talking about osmanthus wine to making weird breathing noises about Gon? By now, I’m sure everyone who has ever played Genshin Impact has praised Silverstein’s performance as Zhongli. None of us could imagine anyone else voicing him in such a sophisticated and wise tone.

But I went down the rabbit hole and re-watched Hunter x Hunter in English. Needless to say, I will never see Genshin Impact‘s Geo Archon the same way again. It scared me to hear Keith Silverstein effortlessly pull off Hisoka’s creepiness with the way he delivered his lines.