"The Only Warped Part Is Her Love for the Young Lady": Voice Actor Fuka Izumi on the Pride Behind Playing a Maid - Nia Liston: The Merciless Maiden Interview

A warrior known as the "Hero Who Slew Gods" is reborn in the body of Nia Liston, a young noblewoman on the verge of succumbing to illness. Having overcome her illness and begun a second life as a noble lady, she still craves deadly battles with the strong. The TV anime Nia Liston: The Merciless Maiden, which tells her story, has been airing since October 6, 2026.

Rinokis Funk serves Nia, who looks like an adorable young lady but is a warrior at heart. As the personal maid of the Liston family, she looks after Nia, and she is also a distinctive character with an almost abnormal level of devotion to her.

Rinokis is played by voice actor Fuka Izumi. What approach did she take in playing a character who colors the series with such rich expressions of joy, anger, sorrow, and delight? We asked her in this interview.

—Rinokis is Nia's maid, but because of her deep affection for Nia, she is quite emotionally expressive, unlike the usual image of a maid.

Izumi: That's right. She's such an emotionally expressive girl that, from the audition onward, I thought "whoever goes all out wins," and I remember playing her with strong colors. Nia isn't someone whose feelings show directly in her expression or tone of voice, so I felt Rinokis was the one who brightens the whole work.

—Is being a maid the main foundation of how you built the character?

Izumi: I always tried to play Rinokis while cherishing the pride she holds as a maid. No matter how wild a gag scene gets, the most important thing for her is that she is Nia Liston's maid. In every scene, I played her with the awareness that she is Rinokis, a maid through and through, but I think there were huge gaps between scenes.

—Her love for Nia sometimes runs out of control. In the gag scenes, do you start by playing it at full throttle?

Izumi: I've never once gone too far and had a take rejected. Every time, I've been allowed to throw myself at it with everything I have, and I've gotten an OK. That said, because the sequence of Rinokis showing her affection to Nia, getting scolded, and drooping is repeated as a running gag, I was given direction that it would stop being funny if it became formulaic.

So, to keep it from becoming formulaic, I thought each time about what feelings Rinokis has when she expresses her affection. I tried to play it with ups and downs, as if multiplying the emotion packed into the lines by a hundred.

Beyond that, she's a girl who doesn't really hold back and expresses everything straight from the heart. She shows her affection to Nia, and when she's angry, she's angry. She truly has no two sides, so I try to play that part straightforwardly as well.