One Piece: Why Shanks Looks So Familiar To Yellowjacket Fans

While "One Piece" has remained a leading manga franchise for more than 25 years now, Netflix is adapting its famously colorful cast of characters to a live-action TV format for the very first time in the series' history for its upcoming "One Piece" show. Of course, this means that some of the most iconic characters in recent anime and manga history will soon be associated with real-life actors, consisting of faces both new to Hollywood and recognizable for their past TV work.

Playing Red-Haired Shanks — the man who inspires protagonist Luffy (Iñaki Godoy) to set off on his lengthy pirate adventure — is Peter Gadiot, who fans of Showtime's cannibal melodrama "Yellowjackets" will recognize. On "Yellowjackets" Gadiot is Adam Martin, a man whom the adult version of Shauna Sadecki (Melanie Lynskey) meets early in Season 1's future timeline. While their first encounter appears to be happenstance, once the two become closer Shauna starts to suspect that his interest in her may not be as random as he claims.

As Shanks, Gadiot's role will most likely be relegated entirely to a flashback sequence detailing Luffy's childhood — in the source material the "One Piece" show is adapting, Luffy and Shanks don't interact save for in that flashback storyline. So, barring any major changes, Adam Martin fans interested in Gadiot's latest work should keep an eye out specifically for the "One Piece" episode establishing Luffy's backstory.

"Yellowjackets" isn't Gadiot's first major TV role, so it's entirely possible viewers will recognize the man playing Red-Haired Shanks in "One Piece" from some of his work prior to the Showtime series. Following a couple of parts in European horror movies and a string of TV appearances, Gadiot's first recurring role on a TV show was as one of the star's of ABC's 2013 take on "Alice in Wonderland" titled "Once Upon a Time in Wonderland." Shortly after that he joined the cast of the Robert Rodriguez-produced action show "Matador."

Gadiot's longest-running TV character to date is James in "Queen of the South," a USA Network drama about a Mexican drug cartel. He works closely with cartel leader Teresa Mendoza (Alice Braga) and appears in a total of 49 episodes. Between "Queen of the South" and "One Piece" Gadiot has also showed up for multi-episode runs on "Supergirl" and recent Apple TV+ hit "Silo." The man playing Shanks, then, might look familiar to fans of any one of these series once he turns up in "One Piece" to introduce Luffy to the pirate lifestyle.