Robert Downey Jr. Named Doctor Doom’s Japanese Voice Himself. Toshiyuki Morikawa Says He and Iron Man’s Late Voice Started Out Together

Marvel held one name back when it announced the Japanese dub cast of Avengers: Doomsday. This week it filled the gap in the most personal way it could: Robert Downey Jr. recorded a video message naming Toshiyuki Morikawa as the Japanese voice of Doctor Doom, and used the same message to thank Keiji Fujiwara, the actor who voiced his Iron Man in Japan until he died in 2020.

“Hello, Japan. Today I’m here to share a special announcement,” Downey says, before introducing “Morikawa-san as the Japanese voice of my character, Doctor Doom.” Then comes the line Japanese fans have been passing around all week: “This new chapter carries forward the incredible work Keiji Fujiwara brought to our past films, whose legacy lives on.”

Doom was the last seat left. Disney had already named 29 Japanese voices for the film, with Yuichi Nakamura back as Steve Rogers, and kept Doom’s voice under wraps while fans guessed, The Disney Scoop reports. Avengers: Doomsday opens on 18 December, the same day in Japan and the United States.

Marvel Studios Japan’s video plays Downey’s message first, then the new Japanese dub trailer. Morikawa’s Doom speaks about a minute in, answering Reed Richards, and he gets the trailer’s last word.

Hear the voice: Robert Downey Jr.’s message to Japan, then Toshiyuki Morikawa as Doctor Doom from 1:04 in the Japanese dub trailer. Video: Marvel Studios Japan, on YouTube

One voice for eleven films

For Japanese audiences, Downey’s Tony Stark has always sounded like Keiji Fujiwara. He dubbed the character from the first Iron Man in 2008 through Avengers: Endgame, eleven films in all, according to Animehunch. He died in April 2020, at 55, after a battle with cancer. “For Japanese audiences, Downey’s voice belonged to one man for more than a decade,” The Disney Scoop wrote this week.

That made Doom a delicate piece of casting. Downey isn’t playing Tony Stark this time, he’s playing the villain, and Doom spends much of his time behind an iron mask, so the voice carries a lot of the performance. But the face under the mask is the one Fujiwara voiced for eleven years, and Japanese fans know it.

Image: Marvel Studios Japan

Two newcomers in the same year

Marvel Studios Japan showed Morikawa the message early, filmed him watching it and posted his answers to two questions on X. Asked how it felt to hear from Downey himself, he said: “It got to me a little. This isn’t AI, is it? (laughs) I was really shown footage that went far beyond anything I’d imagined.”

He kept going: “It was a message straight from Robert Downey Jr., a film actor famous all over the world, and I’ve been a voice actor for 40 years now, so I want to play this role through properly, as the culmination of those 40 years!”

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The second question was the one fans cared about most: how does it feel to follow Fujiwara as Downey’s voice in the Marvel films? “Fujiwara-san and I started out in the same year, and for a long time the two of us came up together as newcomers in the voice acting business,” Morikawa told Marvel Studios Japan. “So I want to reflect his feelings in it properly too, and make it something everyone can enjoy. I also feel very strongly that I don’t want to let anyone down!”

It isn’t the first time he has stepped into a role his old contemporary made famous. In 2016 Morikawa took over Hiroshi Nohara, the dad in Crayon Shin-chan and one of Fujiwara’s best-known parts, The Direct reports. Doom makes it twice.

In Japan, a star keeps a voice

Japanese dubbing tends to give a big foreign star a regular voice, and audiences follow those pairings for years. That’s why a recast lands so hard there, and why a star thanking the old voice by name means more than a polite line in a promo.

The Doomsday cast shows how long those pairings run. Kenta Miyake has dubbed Chris Hemsworth’s Thor since 2011, and Yuichi Nakamura has voiced Chris Evans since Captain America: The First Avenger the same year, Animehunch notes. Daisuke Hirakawa has been Tom Hiddleston’s Loki since 2011 as well. Morikawa himself is the regular Japanese voice of Tom Cruise and Keanu Reeves, and he has already worked in the Marvel films, dubbing Jude Law in Captain Marvel and Martin Freeman in Black Panther.

Plenty of the names are anime stars too. Yuki Kaji, Eren Yeager’s voice in Attack on Titan, plays The Sentry. Maaya Sakamoto is Sue Storm, Takehito Koyasu is Reed Richards and Akio Otsuka is Red Guardian, so a fair share of Japan’s best-known booth voices will be in the same film on 18 December.

The returning X-Men bring their own Japanese voices, and there’s a sad note among them. Mugihito voices Patrick Stewart’s Professor X, a role Stewart filmed before he died on 28 October. His Doomsday appearance, his eighth as Xavier, is now a posthumous one, as The Direct points out.

What fans heard

The Direct, which carried Downey’s message in full, called Morikawa’s Doom in the dubbed trailer “a suitably chilling display,” and added: “it was classy of Downey to pay tribute while making the Morikawa announcement.” Comic Basics noted that Japanese outlets “have run with the emotional angle,” and it’s easy to see why.

Image: Marvel Studios Japan

For anyone who works in a booth, the video is worth a minute of your time. Hollywood stars rarely name their dub voice on camera, and it’s rarer still for one to thank the previous voice by name. Downey did both in under thirty seconds, in a market where dub actors build careers over decades, one star at a time.

In Morikawa’s own reaction video he grins, points straight at the camera and tells fans, in so many words, to go and see it. After forty years in the job, and with his old friend’s role now passing through his hands for a second time, he sounds like a man who’s looking forward to the premiere.

Image: Marvel Studios Japan

Avengers: Doomsday opens in cinemas in Japan and the United States on 18 December 2026.

Sources: Marvel Studios Japan (video message from Robert Downey Jr., the Japanese dub trailer and Toshiyuki Morikawa’s reaction video on YouTube, and Morikawa’s comments posted on X on 2 November 2026); The Direct; The Disney Scoop; Animehunch; Comic Basics. Quotations from Japanese sources are translated by Voice Over Herald. Images: Marvel Studios.

Lee este artículo en español: Robert Downey Jr. presentó en persona la voz japonesa del Doctor Doom. Toshiyuki Morikawa dice que él y la difunta voz de Iron Man empezaron juntos

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