Related reads:The Exiled Heavy Knight Knows How to Game the System Anime Gets Hindi Dub, Tamil, and Telugu Dubs
IGN Otaku Update is IGN India’s original column series exclusively dedicated to covering the animanga fandom and market.
The Exiled Heavy Knight Knows How to Game the System, GoHands’ summer 2026 adaptation of Nekoko and Jaian’s light novel and manga series, follows Elymas Edvaughn, a fifteen-year-old heir to a family of master swordsmen who awakens the “defective” Heavy Knight class during his coming-of-age ritual and gets disowned and exiled for it. He also happens to remember dying in his previous life, where this very world was a VR game he’d mastered obsessively, and where the Heavy Knight was secretly the strongest class in it. So he sets off to rebuild his life from the bottom, armed with knowledge nobody else in this world has access to.
One of the characters watching that fall from grace up close is Malice Edvaughn, a cousin from a branch of the Edvaughn household. In public she’s the picture of a demure, well-bred noble lady. But in private, she’s fixated on Elymas to a degree that kinda goes well past cousinly affection into something closer to derangement.
For this edition of IGN Otaku Update, I talked with Natsuko Abe, the Japanese voice actress behind Malice, to understand about how she played a character defined entirely by that difference between public composure and private obsession – – a role she actually lobbied her own agency to audition for after being approached about a different part entirely. We talked about voicing Malice and her understanding of the character, taking on major roles recently, and a lot more.
Can you please introduce yourself to our readers?
My name is Natsuko Abe, and I belong to a talent agency called Intention. My work is mainly in anime, games, and dubbing.
For readers who don’t know the show yet, how would you introduce Malice Edvaughn to someone who’s never heard of The Exiled Heavy Knight Knows How to Game the System?
She is a girl from a branch of the Edvaughn family — the household the main character, Elymas, was born into — which makes her Elymas’s cousin. In public she carries herself as a demure, well-bred noble lady, but she harbors an intense obsession with Elymas, and when that side of her surfaces she becomes almost deranged. That slightly frightening expression she gets is what really leaves an impression.
You’ve said you actually asked to audition for Malice Edvaughn rather than being offered the role first. What was it about the character on the page that made you push for her specifically?
I had originally been approached to audition for a different character. But when I received the materials and read the manga, Malice made such a strong impression — she really stands out among the characters who appear early on — that I wanted to play her, so I went to my manager and asked if I could audition for Malice as well.
Malice presents as a composed, aristocratic young woman in public, but the character is built around a much colder set of motives underneath. How do you separate those two registers vocally so one never leaks into the other by accident?
She refers to herself with the boyish first-person pronoun “boku,” so at first I pictured giving her a somewhat boyish voice. Even for her prim, young-lady side in the early episodes, I built the character on the lower end of my voice range and brought that to the studio. Then I got the direction, “Why don’t we try making her a little cuter?” I think they were steering me toward creating more range in the vocal performance as well.
For anyone meeting Malice for the first time through the anime, how would you describe her in your own words, not the official character bio, but how you think about her when you’re actually in the booth?
I wanted to convey clearly that she is a character defined by a duality, so that is what I focused on. But she is hard to empathize with — it is easy to come away simply thinking she is an unhinged person. So when I performed her, I filled in her background and the path that shaped her with my own imagination, trying to make her a coherent character you can follow as a real person.
When you got the callback or news that you’d landed the Malice role, what was the direction you were given about how far to push her, versus how much you were left to build on your own?
Normally you don’t receive any direction on how to perform at the point when they tell you whether you passed the audition. The first time I actually talked about the role was at the studio audition. They explained each character thoroughly, one by one, and for Malice they told me she is a character with a sensual quality and that they wanted me to keep that in mind before I went into the audition. There were hardly any changes requested from what I did in the test take — it was more like, “Okay, let’s record the real thing” — so even after I was chosen for the role, I went into the recordings relying on that memory.
How did you feel when you found out you had landed the role of Malice?
Since I had originally been approached about auditioning for a different character, when they told me, “You’ve been cast as Malice,” I was so surprised I actually double-checked — “Malice?!” (laughs).
Is there a specific line or scene of Malice’s, even a small one, that took you multiple takes to get right? And what was it about it that was tricky?
There is a skill name that is like her signature finishing move, and we recorded that one over and over. The action scenes are especially powerful and full of small, precise movements, so I would get direction like, “There is this motion right here, so let’s add that nuance into it,” and we would check the footage again and again, along with notes like “stronger, flashier,” recording it many times in detail.
The movements are fast, and every single cut is so intricately animated that when I tried to voice every motion and perform it with full force, it was a little overwhelming (laughs). That part was difficult.
Looking at your credits over the last couple of years, you’ve moved from a lot of ensemble and background parts into more named, central roles like Malice, Yuna Yagi in Medalist, and Yuri Kawazu in Momentary Lily. Has anything changed in how you approach auditions or preparation now compared to a few years ago?
I still feel like I am feeling my way through, with so much I don’t yet understand, but playing Malice made me realize I had been unconsciously putting the brakes on lines that call for a raised voice, or on big, bold acting. I really felt it while recording to already-finished footage: performances I could only reach within the limits of my own imagination when there was no video got pulled further by the footage, and there were quite a few moments where I thought, “That came out bigger than I expected.” I think playing Malice is part of why I lost my resistance to bold acting — and probably part of why I landed some of the roles that came afterward.
According to the information on the internet, you hold both a librarian’s license and a chainsaw operation certificate, which is a unusual combination. Is this true, and if so, what led you to pursue either of those, and has either one ever come in useful in a role in a way people wouldn’t expect?
That is a certification I got through a university course (laughs). I heard a friend was going to get it over summer break and said, “I want to do it too!” Honestly, it hasn’t actually come in handy for a role yet… (laughs). But as for unexpected ways — when I auditioned to join my agency, the president took a real interest in the certification. He asked me things like, “What made you want to get it?” and “What kind of certification is it?” — so I like to think that is how I passed the audition! In that sense, it was hugely useful (laughs).
Voice acting asks people to fully inhabit personalities very different from their own, sometimes back to back in the same week. Is there a way you personally reset between very different roles, or does that come naturally at this point?
For this, I simply sleep it off and reset. Once the day turns over I can sleep, take some rest, and reset that way. On top of that, I am often entrusted with characters who die in the story, or who go through something truly painful, and those inevitably leave me feeling down — so afterward I will eat something delicious or spend time with friends, get back to everyday life, and switch gears that way.
Is there a type of character you haven’t had the chance to play yet that you’d want to play in the future?
I have been fortunate enough to play the roles I wanted to so far, so I took this question as a chance to think about it anew. In the future, I would love to play a strong woman, like a mafia boss.
Finally, in a word for the readers of this article, could you give us a reason to look forward to The Exiled Heavy Knight?
I think some people were drawn in by Malice from her very first appearance, but the point where she truly faces off against Elymas is still to come. The first season is heading into its climax as well — it gets incredibly exciting, and I think the animation, including the visuals themselves, will keep powering up as it builds toward the finale — so I really hope everyone will look forward to it!
Rayan Sayyed is the deputy editor for IGN India who writes and speaks on pop culture, spanning from games, anime, manga to films and everything in between. You can reach out to him at rayan_sayyed@ign.com, or find him on Instagram @rayansayyed and Twitter/X @rayanaver
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