With Fire Force Season 3 heading into its second cour on 9 January 2026, fans are bracing themselves for the last stretch of the story, especially when it comes to one of its most unhinged and beloved characters, Arthur Boyle.
At Anime Festival Asia (AFA) Singapore 2025, Japanese voice actor Yusuke Kobayashi sat down with justsaying.ASIA to talk about returning to Arthur in the final season, how he approaches the “knight king” of Company 8, and why Arthur’s brand of delusional confidence ended up changing him, too.
Crunchyroll will be streaming the upcoming second cour of Season 3, as well as the earlier seasons that chart Arthur’s journey from loud-mouthed rookie to one of the series’ most powerful and chaotic Fire Soldiers.
Arthur Boyle is a third-generation pyrokinetic who believes, with absolute conviction, that he is a knight king. His power scales with his delusions, channelled through his sword hilt “Excalibur” as plasma he can cut and control. It sounds ridiculous on paper, but Kobayashi is very clear about the foundation of his performance.
“I think his confidence is something that doesn’t really have a basis. It’s all a delusion,” he said. “But he believes in it with all his heart. No matter how much people think something is wrong about him, he believes in himself.”
The key, for him, is to play that stubbornness in a way that remains endearing. Arthur might be ridiculous, but he should never feel hollow. Kobayashi’s job is to make viewers feel that this is simply who Arthur is, not a gag for its own sake.
From Season 1 to Season 3, he doesn’t see Arthur’s core personality changing at all – but what does change is the experience. “He’s becoming more and more reliable,” Kobayashi explained.
“And when I play him, his voice is getting thicker and thicker. His voice may have changed more over time than when he first started. He’s not mature yet in terms of age, but he’s growing up and fighting, and his muscles are getting bigger.”
“There’s nothing drastically changing between Season 1 and 3, but it’s really the layers that he puts on top of one another. And so naturally, for example, his voice would change a little bit, and then it becomes really more solid and more powerful.”
Despite voicing such an over-confident character, Kobayashi describes himself as someone who doesn’t actually have that much confidence in real life.
“I’m a person who doesn’t have much confidence in myself,” he admitted. “But as I get older, I don’t care about these things anymore.”
He isn’t sure if it’s entirely because of Arthur, but he feels that playing a character who doesn’t overthink things has had an influence. Arthur lives the way he believes, without constantly second-guessing himself, and that attitude has, in some ways, rubbed off on the actor.
Arthur swings wildly between comic relief and serious combatant, often in the span of a single episode. Rather than trying to smooth out that contrast, Kobayashi leans into it fully.
In the manga panels, he notes, you can clearly see when Arthur is meant to be comical and when he is deadly serious. Translating that into voice meant committing to both sides completely.
“If I try to ‘act comical because it’s comical’, it collapses a little,” he said. “When he’s serious, he’s serious. When he’s silly, he’s really silly. When you try to be funny, it’s not funny. So I put 100% into each side. In total, that’s like 200%.”
For Arthur’s exaggerated, kingly way of speaking, Kobayashi relied on his past experience. “I’ve played a lot of kings and princes in the past, so I had that as a base,” he shared. There were initial discussions about the pitch of the voice, but the pride and loyalty in Arthur’s tone mainly came from his own toolkit.
Arthur’s relationship with protagonist Shinra Kusakabe is one of Fire Force’s most entertaining rivalries. Behind the scenes, Kobayashi’s dynamic with Shinra’s voice actor, Gakuto Kajiwara, has evolved just as much as their characters.
“At the beginning, Kajiwara was still a newcomer,” he recalled. “He was really hardworking and often asked, ‘What should I do?’” As the seasons went on, both actors grew more independent. These days, they don’t talk as much about how to play scenes before stepping into the booth.
Instead, they “check each other’s work on the actual stage”, turning their exchanges into a real-time “vocal fight” that mirrors the characters’ clash.
It’s a fitting but straightforward image: Arthur and Shinra pushing each other to go bigger, louder and more honest, both in-universe and in the recording studio.
Asked about his favourite line in the series, Kobayashi pointed to a simple but powerful one about knights, heroes and firefighters protecting the ones they love.
“For me, it all comes down to protecting your important people, your precious ones and loved ones,” he said. That line stands out more now, in retrospect, because he resonates strongly with that idea.
Looking at Fire Force as a whole, what stays with him is the theme of unity. He describes the story as one in which different, sometimes eccentric characters all fight for the same thing, held together by a figure who stands in the middle and unifies them.
Seeing that play out over the years made him think, “I’d love to work under someone like that.”
It’s a quiet reflection, but one that says a lot about how he sees the series beyond the flashy fire battles. Knowing that Season 3 would be the final one gave Kobayashi a clear sense of purpose when he stepped back into the booth.
He talked about watching his castmates grow from fresh faces when the show first started to seasoned professionals, and about wanting to “put a solid seal” on the series with his performance.
He also pointed out that the world of Fire Force isn’t strictly black-and-white. Characters aren’t purely good or evil. Everyone has different sides and motivations.
That philosophical tone, he feels, is part of what makes the anime interesting, and he hopes that comes through strongly in the final stretch.
On what fans can expect from Arthur in Season 3’s second cour, he stayed spoiler-free, but did offer a small tease: “Just be ready for something unexpected,” he said with a laugh.
In a lighter moment, Kobayashi was asked which power he would choose: the ability to come back to life or pyrokinetic abilities. He chose the latter. For him, pyrokinetics represents the “motivation of living”, the spark of ignition that keeps you moving.
In reality, he joked, either would probably be fine, but given the choice, he’d go with fire.
As for future roles, he has a clear wish: he wants to play a truly evil character. Not a villain who later joins the heroes, but someone who stays bad until the very end. A character like Fire Force’s Joker is close, but Kobayashi is hoping for an even darker role someday.
When asked what advice he would give Arthur to navigate life outside of the fire, he paused and ultimately decided that advice might not matter. “Arthur has his own life, his own world. He’s living in his own little bubble, and he’s definitely not going to change,” he said.
If he had to say something, though, it would be this: “Just be you. Don’t change anything. It’s enough as it is now.”
For a character built on baseless confidence, it feels like the most fitting blessing to carry into Fire Force’s final battles, and into Season 3 Cour 2 when it hits screens in January 2026.