Ryan Colt Levy

written by Nartana Nólë
on 8.8.26 in 💫 Talent Spotlight

D.C. DOUGLAS 🔗: I met this sweet man in person – finally – in 2026 at ConnectiCon. But we’ve known each other casually via the internet and our mutual friendship with UmbrellaSpecter. He is so very magnanimous and endearing! Someone you instantly feel at ease with. – From “Shocking Truth“

Ryan Colt Levy: The Voice Actor Who Made Chaos Sound Weirdly Human

Ryan Colt Levy is a New York-born actor, musician, and voice performer whose career now spans major English-language anime dubs, theatrical releases, streaming series, and games. His IMDb profile identifies Chainsaw Man (Denji, 2022) and My Hero Academia: World Heroes’ Mission (Rody Soul, 2021) among his known work, and the Rody Soul credit appears directly on that matched profile. Those two credits align with independent casting records, so this is the correct Ryan Colt Levy rather than a name-only match. This matters because there are enough actors on Earth already without accidentally giving somebody else’s biography to the man who voices Denji.

Early Career and Background

In a 2022 Forbes interview about his career, Levy explained that film, art, and music occupied his attention from childhood. He picked up guitar at age 12, formed bands with friends, and spent more than 15 years touring and making records. In 2015 he moved to Los Angeles with his bandmates and returned seriously to acting, training in scene study and improv while taking work that ranged from background acting to commercials. Voice acting was not the master plan. He booked a voice project, discovered that he preferred the process, and kept going, which is annoyingly efficient for a career pivot that usually requires several notebooks, three identity crises, and a parking violation.

That music background helps explain a feature that later became useful in his voice work: Levy listens to rhythm. Dialogue performance depends on more than having an interesting sound. An actor has to hear where a thought turns, where a breath interrupts it, and where a character’s emotional temperature changes before the sentence ends. Years spent singing, playing guitar, and performing live do not automatically produce a strong voice actor, but they can sharpen timing, phrasing, and responsiveness. Levy carried those tools into animation rather than treating the booth like a place where one simply talks louder at cartoons.

Breakthrough Roles

Rody Soul in My Hero Academia: World Heroes’ Mission (2021)

One of Levy’s most important early roles was Rody Soul in My Hero Academia: World Heroes’ Mission in 2021. Rody was not background decoration. He functioned as a central new character in the third theatrical film from the enormous My Hero Academia franchise, placing Levy beside an established English cast while asking him to make a newly introduced character emotionally credible almost immediately. Levy later described the part as especially personal and memorable. The role gave him a substantial dramatic showcase before an international anime audience, which is the sort of modest professional development that only involves entering a major franchise and somehow not being crushed by the furniture.

Rody also demanded tonal flexibility. The character moves between streetwise humor, suspicion, fear, loyalty, and genuine emotional exposure. That sort of role punishes a performer who decides on one “cool voice” and refuses to leave it. Levy instead had to let Rody’s defenses shift with the story, preserving his quickness without flattening the more vulnerable material.

Denji in Chainsaw Man (2022)

The decisive leap came with Denji, the protagonist of Chainsaw Man in 2022. Crunchyroll’s official English dub cast announcement named Levy as Denji, putting him at the center of MAPPA’s adaptation of Tatsuki Fujimoto’s manga. Denji is a deceptively difficult assignment. He can sound crude, hungry, ridiculous, exhausted, hopeful, violent, wounded, and almost childlike within a very small span of screen time. The performance has to honor the comedy without turning him into a joke and honor the pain without making him suddenly sound like a different character.

Levy’s work landed. At the 2024 Crunchyroll Anime Awards, he won Best Voice Artist Performance in English for Denji, as confirmed in Crunchyroll’s official winners list. The award carried extra weight because Chainsaw Man itself won Best New Series that year, while Denji was also nominated for Best Main Character. Awards do not make a performance good, obviously. They do, however, become inconvenient evidence when one is trying to argue that the actor somehow wandered into the role by administrative error.

Range Beyond Denji

Levy has continued building a résumé that does not simply photocopy Denji with different hair. He voices Jazz M. Andro in Welcome to Demon School! Iruma-kun (2019), a role he returned to for the English dub of Season 4 in 2026. He also voices Loki in Netflix’s Record of Ragnarok (2021), including the third season released in 2025. Loki requires a different center of gravity from Denji: more calculation, more amusement, less emotional transparency. The contrast matters because casting directors notice whether an actor can carry recognizable energy from project to project without dragging the same characterization into every booth.

Levy also returned as Denji in Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc (2025), extending his association with the character beyond the original television season. By July 2026, Crunchyroll had announced him as Ryosuke Shiba in the same-day English dub of Black Torch (2026). That casting is useful career context. It shows that the period after the Denji award did not become a victory lap where everyone politely stared at a trophy. New roles kept arriving.

Performance Style and Voice Craft

From a professional peer perspective inside voice acting, Levy’s strongest quality is his control of emotional contradiction. Denji works because the performance does not polish away the character’s uglier impulses or over-explain his innocence. Levy can keep a line loose and almost tossed away, then tighten the breath or sharpen the attack when danger arrives. That change in vocal pressure creates emotional information before the dialogue itself catches up.

He also understands character consistency. In dubbing, an actor works inside fixed animation, translated dialogue, timing constraints, mouth movements, and an established performance language, all while trying to make the line feel spontaneous in English. The best work hides the machinery. Levy’s performances often preserve a sense that the character has just invented the thought, which is difficult when the actor may be matching a preexisting beat down to fractions of a second. (The glamorous part of voice acting remains staring at a beeping screen until human instinct agrees to cooperate with geometry.)

His musical history likely reinforces another strength: tempo. Comedy needs clean timing, panic needs controlled acceleration, and intimate material often needs the confidence to leave space. Levy does not treat intensity as a permanent volume setting. He uses pace, breath, and vocal texture to distinguish emotional states, which gives directors more usable choices and gives characters more dimensionality without forcing the performance to announce what it is doing.

Industry Impact and Career Significance

Levy’s career is significant because it reflects a modern route into voice acting that does not begin with one clean lane. He came through music, live performance, on-camera work, acting classes, commercials, and then voiceover. That background now supports work across theatrical anime, streaming series, television dubbing, and games. More importantly, his major credits show increasing responsibility: Rody Soul carried much of the emotional load of a franchise film, Denji made him the English lead of a MAPPA adaptation that later won Best New Series at the Crunchyroll Anime Awards, and the 2024 voice acting award converted that attention into formal recognition.

As of 2026, Levy is no longer best described as an emerging actor who happened to land one enormous role. He has returned to established characters, moved into fresh productions, and sustained enough range to avoid being defined by a single franchise association. That matters for long-term casting. Otherwise a perfectly capable actor spends the next twenty years being asked to reproduce one scream at conventions while somebody nearby sells a laminated photograph for forty dollars.

Ryan Colt Levy has built a career on a useful contradiction: his performances often sound immediate and unguarded even though the work behind them demands control, timing, repetition, and technical precision. He made Rody Soul feel lived-in, made Denji’s appetites and damage coexist without apology, and kept expanding after the award arrived. The dangerous precedent is now established: apparently, spending years in bands, moving across the country, training as an actor, learning the booth, and then doing excellent work can occasionally lead to success in Los Angeles.

Learn how D.C. Douglas Annoyed Ryan Colt Levy:SHOCKING: D.C. Douglas Exposes Truth About 101 Voice Actors!

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