Taz Skylar Is All In

Fresh off a long-haul flight and buried under a mountain of jet lag, Taz Skylar didn’t head for a bed; he went straight to a beach in Cape Town: “I went for a fucking swim and a sauna, just to feel human again!” This relentless, high-octane energy isn’t a mere byproduct of his demanding schedule; it belies the very fabric of his life. Speaking during a brief pause in filming the third season of Netflix’s massive hit live-action anime adaptation One Piece, Skylar paints the picture of an artist who operates with an ingrained lack of hesitation. Whether jumping out of a plane or defending the honor of his character’s choreography, Skylar is a man who lives on the edge of a countdown.

Skylar’s connection to the sprawling, vibrant world of One Piece isn’t something he had to invent for the screen. Growing up in Spain, Japanese animation was part of the local afterschool diet. Long before streaming platforms algorithmically fed anime to the masses, Skylar was catching shows on general television in the evenings. He recounts watching Digimon, Naruto, Dragon Ball Z, and Oliver and Benji alongside Pokemon Diamond. Though he lost track of the multi-decade epic as he transitioned into adulthood, his childhood memory of Sanji, the swashbuckling pirate chef he now embodies, was distinct in its simplicity: “I remembered as far as the guy with the suit.“ Today, as that very man in the suit, Skylar is bringing a visceral, grounded depth to a character millions have loved for decades.

One Piece, which adapts one of anime’s longest running narratives, follows the adventures of a ragtag crew of pirates assembled by Monkey D. Luffy in pursuit of a mysterious legendary treasure known only as the “One Piece.” Centered on explorations of freedom, inherited will, and the nature of achieving one’s dreams, One Piece has cultivated a massive following across the globe since the original (and still running) manga first published in 1997. Netflix’s latest adaptation premiered in 2023 to massive worldwide attention.

Before stepping onto the grand sets of a Netflix flagship series, Skylar’s artistic breeding ground was the London theater scene, where he first came to attention as the co-writer and star of the play Warheads, which was nominated for an Olivier Award. He jokes about being “dragged“ into theater in a positive way, reflecting on his time in off-West End productions as some of the most fulfilling years of his life. It was a world where a crew had to construct entire physical realities out of nothing but imagination and sheer will, putting together sets from IKEA boxes.

Many might assume that transitioning to a massive intellectual property like One Piece means entering a realm of infinite resources where actors are insulated from production struggles—Skylar quickly dispels that myth. While there is certainly more capital available than in his theater days, that money is stretched incredibly thin across a wildly ambitious production. In reality, that scrappy, problem-solving theater brain became his greatest asset; when the clock is ticking, the scale of the budget doesn’t matter as much as the collective will to finish the day. “The same attitude that we had in off-West End plays of ‘shit, we’re going to go on in five minutes and something just broke on the set!—we’re all going to have to pitch in and fix it,’ that same thing still applies.”

Take the scene where his character fights the “unluckies“—a bizarre CGI otter and vulture. Due to standard, crushing time constraints, the production had essentially whittled the choreographed sequence down to a simple kick and a kick. Unwilling to let a potentially spectacular moment die on the operating table, Skylar spent his weekend at the director’s house. They workshopped an extended choreographed sequence—replete with slapstick humor— and filmed the whole routine before cutting it together in iMovie to pitch back to the stunt team. “The kid in me was the one who didn’t want to let that die,“ he says with a grin.

Executing that fight was another exercise in raw imagination. While the vulture was represented by a flying drone in the sky for some exterior moments, many of the practical elements were shockingly mundane or intensely chaotic. Skylar recounts running away from real explosives on his way to a wax house, noting that his main job in that moment was simply to not get hit. For the indoor fight, the parts of the vulture that interact with the actors were simply foam tubes with a cardboard beak attached to the front. “And then the otter is zero,“ Skylar notes, explaining that the ferocious animal was nothing more than thin air. He found himself in a room with a single, static camera, executing precise aerial combat moves and timing his jumps out of frame just to coordinate where the invisible otter was supposed to be.

That refusal to accept mediocrity or lean on pure CGI is evident in Skylar’s jaw-dropping commitment to his physical training. He didn’t come to the role equipped with a lifetime background in martial arts; instead, his athletic training is anchored in extreme sports. He’s jumped out of three hundred planes and climbed mountains. While pointing out that falling through the sky doesn’t directly translate to mastering a high kick, he credits extreme sports with giving him something far more important: mindset. “Extreme sports really taught me the element of choosing that you’re going to do something. Counting yourself down into that...and once the countdown has happened, you do the thing,“ Skylar proclaims.

When tasked with turning his body into a weapon for the first season, he applied that exact lack of hesitation, turning the acquisition of the skill into an extreme sport in itself. He admits he had to “be a little bit psycho” about it to make up for a lifetime of not doing martial arts. He trained for eight hours a day, every day, for six straight months. Now, in the thick of filming the third season, his regimen has evolved into a “three-time-a-day endeavor.“ He works out in the morning before stepping on set, spends his thirty-minute lunch break drilling skills, and trains for another hour and a half after the cameras wrap for the day. Even on press tours, he packs his running joggers in his bag; in a gap between interviews, he will change, sprint through whatever city he is visiting, return to the hotel to have his makeup reapplied, and sit right back down for the next journalist. He’s fueled by a constant fear that he’ll lose his peak physicality without constant maintenance—”I always have this insecurity that I’m going to lose it if I don’t use it. I just practice all day.”

Sanji’s specific fighting style presents a unique creative hurdle: because the character (a culinary wunderkind) values his hands too much to use them as weapons of violence, everything must be done with his feet. To stop the choreography from getting stale or devolving into a repetitive loop of hook kicks and turning kicks, Skylar and his stunt double/trainer, DeVille, established a strict rule: if they’ve seen it before on screen, they cannot use it. They have brought in ballet coaches, breakdancers, and practitioners of capoeira, animal flow, and jiu-jitsu—”I’ve done fucking judo!”—to find entirely new ways to move through physical space.

His relentless pursuit of the unpredictable is deeply tied to what Skylar describes as an innate rebelliousness in his DNA. He articulates this with a brilliant analogy about acting and perception: going to a zoo versus going on a safari to see a lion. All of us appreciate a lion on a safari with more awe than we appreciate seeing one in the zoo—we don’t know what the lion in the wild is going to do next. Predictability, to Skylar, is artistic death. He guards his own wildness fiercely because that unpredictability is what makes an audience lean in.

Yet, living as a highly visible safari lion in the modern age of fandom comes with a heavy, unanticipated toll. Skylar speaks with a disarming vulnerability about the overwhelming wave of fame that has crashed over him. To describe the sudden influx of global attention, he offers a beautifully poignant metaphor: “I like to say to myself that I ordered the current life that I have on Amazon. But I didn’t account for what to do with all the boxes.“

Those boxes represent the clutter of a life that is suddenly alien to most people. He admits that while to a degree every young boy chasing a career in the public eye wants to be an actor, singer, or athlete partly for simple, superficial reasons like getting attention, the reality is far more complex. “I actually think I used to do better when nobody knew who the fuck I was because there was no consequence,” he admits. Back then, there were no people waiting outside his hotel or constant questions about the intentions of those around him.

He discusses the concept of a “social battery“ that gets dangerously depleted. When thousands of fans are screaming his name in Tokyo or Los Angeles, it triggers a primal, high-alert neurological response that eventually leaves him hollowed out. He shares the raw reality of the crash that followed when the One Piece adaptation exploded onto the international stage. On days when security pulled him away from a crowd before he could sign every autograph or take every picture, he returned to his hotel room beating himself up. He would sit, stare at the wall for two hours, unable to piece together in his brain the mechanical actions to even take a shower.

“You have to become okay with the fact that you’re human and you’re doing your best. This is not a regular situation, so you can’t act in a regular way!” Skylar declares fervently, recalling the mentality he learned to nurture following the first season’s release. “The only way to act is to wholeheartedly and earnestly try to interact, try to give a human moment to as many people as possible. You [then] don’t beat yourself up about it. You live with it.”

Having overcome the crushing fatigue and the piles of cardboard boxes that littered his psychological landscape, Skylar’s eyes light up when he looks to the future. True to his uncurated, rebellious self, his dream project isn’t some predictable prestige drama. He is a massive autobiography reader, and he is currently obsessed with Professional Idiot, the memoir of Jackass star Steve-O.

For Skylar, Jackass wasn’t just mindless slapstick; it was the original, pure attention-grabbing phenomenon before reels and TikTok algorithms took over the world. He sees in Steve-O a brilliant vehicle with which to ask deep, cultural questions about our society’s obsessive, fraught relationship with attention. He is hellbent on securing the adaptation rights.

“Hopefully at some point, if I say it enough, he’ll read it and just give me the rights to his book,“ Skylar jokes. If his track record of countdowns and sheer, unyielding willpower is any indication, Steve-O might as well start drafting the contract now.

One Piece is now streaming on Netflix.