Karen Fukuhara On Finding Kimiko's Voice and What She Took From The Boys Set

Kimiko finally finds her voice as The Boys enters its fifth and final season. Speaking with Pop Culture Planet’s Kristen Maldonado, Karen Fukuhara opens up about Kimiko’s journey and what she took from the set of The Boys.

Despite being an incredible voice actor, Fukuhara’s Kimiko didn’t speak for the first four seasons of The Boys. “That was always a running joke between my mom and my friends. She was like, it's so funny how you don't speak at all in a lot of your live-action shows and then you're such a chatterbox in your voiceover,” she laughed. “I had such a great time doing the sign language. [We] made the KSL, Kimiko Sign Language, up. It was very much a language of its own that Amanda [Richer], our coach, created. It wasn't like I was just gibberishing the choreography of it all. It was actually word for word translated.”

Fukuhara loves doing the prep work when it comes to bringing her characters to life. “Working with her was such a special experience and she gave me so much insight on how I should play Kimiko. I got so many ideas from her lived experiences, right? I wouldn't have had any access to that if I had just done my own research just on Google. I try to do as much prep work as possible so I will go to the location or I will call the expert or things like that,” she explained. “But it's so much meatier when you get to spend day in day out with a person. You become friends with them and then you get so much more out of that experience than just one 30 minute to an hour phone call. So as an actor, that was a blessing.”

In the final season, Kimiko finally finds her voice. “Season 5 was a huge change for the character and rightfully so. She's gone through so many changes over the seasons. She's gone through a lot. She's lost a brother. She was kidnapped. She needed to get revenge. Lots of dark, violent instincts coming from her lived experiences and her trauma. She has finally gone through that,” Fukuhara revealed. “There's a scene where she tells Frenchie (Tomer Capone) that he likes chaos and he thrives in chaos. Kimiko has been right there with him too, right? They have similar backstories and similar experiences where they feel like they've wronged people and there's no turning back from it because they've done such horrible things. In season 4, she tells Frenchie that there is a path forward for people like us. This season she acknowledges that although they started off in the same place he's still stuck in the chaos and he still loves to be a part of that in a way. She's done the work and she doesn't want to go back there and I think that's growth.”

Her favorite scene revealed just how much Kimiko has grown. “I really loved the scene where Kimiko lets Newman's daughter go with his father instead of Frenchie shooting them. I really love the line, ‘Let them go,’” she said. “‘They should grow up like kids, not like us.’”

So what did Fukuhara take from the set to commemorate her time on the show? “I took a lot of things,” she gushed. “Mainly clothing. I have a lot of the leather jackets because I love a good jacket and Kimiko's had some really, really great ones.”

“I always wanted to take a prop of her, something to remember the character by other than like an item of clothing, you know?” she continued. “But Kimiko doesn't really have any props, to be honest. She had the origami mice, but I did not end up finding one of those this season, so I couldn't take that.”

She even shared fun little details that the prop department set up. “Interesting story about the origami mice throughout the season. The props department would come in. They would have like 15 of those origami mice and [they] would come set it up in a cute way every single time,” she said. “There was one where like one looked like a dictator and then all the mice were surrounding the dictator mouse. [Or] they're in a battlefield and they're all collapsed. It was just like little things here and there. I don't know if it ever made it to the screen, but small details like that made me really happy to come on set and have something to talk about with the props department.”

New episodes of The Boys season 5 air Wednesdays on Prime Video.