Trivia / Rent-A-Girlfriend

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• Acting for Two: In the English dub:
  • Colleen O'Shaughnessey voices both Harumi Kinoshita and Sayuri Ichinose.
  • Landon McDonald voices Shun "Kuri" Kuribayashi and Katsuhito Ichinose.
  • Suzie Yeung voices Sumi and one of the dudes in the crowd in the Season 1 finale.
• Blooper: The first magazine release of Chapter 240 mistakenly labeled it as "The Kiss and My Girlfriend 9" when it's actually Part 1 of the Assessment and My Girlfriend Arc.
• Colbert Bump: The series became more popular after Paolo from Tokyo featured Reiji Miyajima in one of his educational "Day in the Life of a Japanese..." videos.
• Cross-Dressing Voices: According to Suzie Yeung, Sumi's English voice actress, the English dub of the Season 1 finale decided to have a little fun by having her voice one of the many background dudes ogling the girls.
• Dawson Casting: Mio Kudo, Ruka's live-action actress, was 22 years old when the live-action adaptation premiered.
• Inspiration for the Work: Miyajima was inspired to create the manga after reading an online article about Chinese men hiring rental girlfriends to impress their parents during the Lunar New Year holidays, according to a June 2020 interview by the manga's English publisher Kodansha USA. He even hired a rental girlfriend to immerse himself into the experience.
• Newbie Boom: Two years after the series began, by November 2019, the manga had sold 2.5 million copies in Japan. After the anime's announcement a month later, sales continued to grow and eventually surpassed the 4 million mark in June 2020. Within a month of the anime's premiere, the series surpassed the 5 million mark in August 2020, which Miyajima celebrated on his Twitter account. Overseas, the anime brought in a wave of new fans, and following the first season's end, many jumped ship to the manga to see what would happen next.
• The Original Darrin: After being replaced by Aoi Yūki for a 2018 commercial, Sora Amamiya returned to voice Chizuru Mizuhara for the 2020 anime.
• The Other Darrin:
  • Japanese version:
    • Kazuya Kinoshita was voiced by three different voice actors: Jun Fukushima (2017 commercial), Haruki Ishiya (2018 commercial) and Shun Horie (2020 anime).
    • For the 2018 commercial, Chizuru Mizuhara was voiced by Aoi Yūki instead of Sora Amamiya.
  • English dub:
    • When episode 14 premiered, Kazuya's regular English voice actor, Aleks Le, was infected with COVID-19, so Alejandro Saab voiced Kazuya in the episode.
• Playing Against Type: In the Japanese version, Ryūsei Nakao, whose most famous role is the cruel galactic overlord Frieza from the Dragon Ball franchise and who is renown for mainly voicing villainous characters, gets to voice Chizuru's kind, supportive, and excitable grandfather Katsuhito in the second season, a far cry from the roles he's usually cast in.
• Throw It In!: In the bonus page of Volume 7, Miyajima admits that he belatedly realized his mistake of drawing Chizuru wearing a catcher’s mitt on her right hand despite that being her dominant hand on the title page of Chapter 57. Rather than redraw it, he used the bonus page to explain it with a brief scene of her borrowing the glove from someone else.
• Underage Casting: Oideyasu Oda and Kaoru Noguchi were 43 and 46, respectively, when they portrayed Kazuo and Harumi Kinoshita in the live-action adaptation.
• Wag the Director: While on Trash Taste, Aleks Le mentioned that whenever there are parts of Kazuya’s script he doesn’t vibe with, the dub directors don’t mind him making up his own lines for fun as long as the original intent is still conveyed. He also mentioned that the one time they didn’t budge on this was when he was recording one of Kazuya’s masturbation scenes, and they refused to change any part of the script for that no matter how embarrassing he found it.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Miyajima has said in interviews that Mami was originally intended to be a one-off character who would never be seen after the first chapter, but changed his mind when he wondered what kind of background such a character would have.
  • One of his Twitter posts reveals that the final version of Chapters 220-222 became quite different from their original drafts.
• You Sound Familiar: Mami's Japanese voice actress, Aoi Yūki, previously played Chizuru in the 2018 commercial.

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