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The sly hand of fate always finds a way to influence us in unexpected ways, and that includes creating opportunities for actors to take on roles that, sometimes, they don’t even audition for. The smallest interaction can become the moment a director knows they have found the right person for the part. For example, when Eric Vale left his headshot at Funimation’s studios during a cold audition, he had no idea that it would eventually lead to him being cast as Trunks, one of the fan-favorite characters from Dragon Ball Z.

The story behind Eric Vale’s strange path to playing the half-Saiyan from the future in the English dub of Dragon Ball Z came out during a panel at Florida Supercon 2025. “We were very lucky,” Christopher Sabat, who plays Vegeta, Piccolo, and several other characters in Dragon Ball Z and who was the ADR director of the English dub at Funimation at the time, explained. “Because Eric had come in to audition long before we needed Trunks.” Vale had come into the Houston, Texas-based studio for a dry audition (what Sabat called a “cattle call.”

“And Eric did something really bizarre,” Sabat continued. “People don’t normally bring a headshot to a voice-over audition. It is very common in most of the industry, but not at Funimation… Luckily, he left that. We were trying to audition for Trunks, and I was like, we couldn’t find anyone we loved, and I was like, ‘Wait a minute! The dude! The guy with the headshot!’ and I picked up his headshot, but the resume that was attached to it that had his contact information was gone.”

This could have ended Eric Vale’s time in Dragon Ball Z before it even began, but it wasn’t quite the end of the story. There was one more coincidence in the mix. “Except Tiffany Vollmer [the English voice of Bulma at the time] was there and said, ‘I know that guy! That’s Eric! He works in Denton. I know that dude. He works at a pizza place.’ And I was like, ‘Well, can you go get him?’ and she said yeah and then he came to audition and he was Trunks.”

You can see this moment and hear plenty of other behind-the-scenes stories from anime history from the Dragon Ball Z panel at Florida Supercon 2025 right here.

Each week, Popverse's resident anime expert Trent Cannon runs down the latest and, dare we say "greatest," in anime and manga in Popverse Jump. Some recent columns have included... 

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