Charles Melton Joins Destin Daniel Cretton’s Naruto as Kakashi Hatake
The May December and Beef actor has been cast in Lionsgate’s live-action Naruto movie, with Destin Daniel Cretton set to write and direct. The lead trio is still being searched for, which puts Melton’s Kakashi in the room before Naruto, Sasuke and Sakura have faces.
Charles Melton has joined Lionsgate’s live-action Naruto movie as Kakashi Hatake, Yahoo reported, citing The Hollywood Reporter. That is a tidy sentence with a lot of weight inside it, because Kakashi is not a small chair in this particular room.
He is the elite ninja mentor to Naruto Uzumaki, the boy at the center of Masashi Kishimoto’s long-running manga and anime. In a story built around young people with dangerous gifts and louder dreams, Kakashi is the adult who has to look cool, tired, funny and lethal, sometimes all before lunch.
Melton Gets The Mask
Yahoo reported that Melton will play Kakashi in the film, which is expected to begin shooting next year. The movie is being made by Lionsgate, with Destin Daniel Cretton attached to write and direct after the studio brought him aboard two years ago.
For Melton, the casting asks for a specific kind of presence. Kakashi is popular for reasons that do not fit neatly on a studio memo. He is a mentor, yes, but he is also a man who withholds as much as he gives. The mask does some of the acting, and that means the actor has to do more with the eyes, the shoulders, the pause before a line.
Melton has been building toward parts that require that kind of quiet pressure. Yahoo noted that he recently received an Emmy nomination for his performance in Netflix’s Beef. The same actor who can sit in discomfort and let a room curdle now gets handed one of anime’s more famous deadpan faces.
That is hopeful, not proof. Nobody has seen this film. Nobody knows yet how the mask will look, how the hair will move, or whether the script gives Kakashi enough room to be more than a poster come to life. But on paper, the job makes sense.
Photo: Gabriel Hutchinson · CC BY-SA 4.0 · source
Cretton’s Franchise Work
Cretton is a big part of why this casting will get attention outside the Naruto crowd. Yahoo identified him as the director of Spider-Man: Brand New Day, which the outlet said has grossed more than $2 billion globally. It also noted his 2021 Marvel film Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.
That MCU connection matters because it tells ordinary readers what kind of machine Lionsgate is trying to build here. This is not a small character drama trying on a costume for fun. It is a live-action version of a manga that ran in Japan’s Weekly Shonen Jump from 1999 to 2014 and later became animated series seen on Cartoon Network and Disney XD, according to Yahoo.
