Katey Sagal as Dr. Kureha in 'One Piece.'

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So when Netflix announced its season two cast additions in 2025, it was unsurprising to see a number of familiar faces. Among them was Katey Sagal, a queen of the small screen known for playing bold, colorful, fierce and at times rough-around-the-edges women. And while not a staple of big genre projects — instead garnering most of her career acclaim and award recognition for her roles in Married… with Children, 8 Simple Rules, Sons of Anarchy and Rebel, as well as long-running adult animation Futurama — her casting has been wholly embraced by One Piece fans.

Sagal’s portrayal of Dr. Kureha was equally exciting for both the team and the actress, who told The Hollywood Reporter she was first approached around spring or summer of 2024. “There was no audition. It was an offer. I was just so excited. You get jobs where you’re just like, ‘Oh my God,’” she recalls. “It came pretty much after I’d watched [the first season]. It was a wonderful call to get. I was out of my mind. Then they started sending me the images and who the character is.”

One Piece season two co-showrunner Joe Tracz recalls, “We reached out to her, and she had watched that first season with her family, and had no idea that it was an adaptation of anything. She just thought it was a really good show on Netflix. The fact that the show existed and had proved that it could pull this live-action adaptation off meant that we were able to reach people that were on our vision board.”

Sagal of her early relationship to the series was thanks to her husband, prolific TV creator Kurt Sutter. “I was not super familiar with manga at all. Anime — which is like Pokémon? — I’ve raised kids all about Pokémon. They were Pokémon freaks. But the manga I didn’t know,” she tells THR. “My husband came home one day and said he’d been talking to somebody at Netflix who told him to watch this show called One Piece. So we sat down with my 17-year-old. We didn’t know what it was going to be, and could not stop watching it. That first season was so heartwarming and edgy. It hit all the right notes for me, my husband and our 17-year-old. It was beautiful.”

Katey Sagal as Dr. Kureha in season two of One Piece.

Sagal plays Dr. Kureha, a 140-year-old doctor who has become the lone practitioner on Drum Island after the other doctors were rounded up by King Wapol (Rob Colletti), a tyrannical leader whose self-important nature and volatile tendencies have crushed his once-flourishing kingdom. Dubbed a “witch” by the townspeople, Kureha operates out of the abandoned Drum Castle, which is situated at the top of a mountain overlooking the town. There, she begrudgingly trains a young talking reindeer named Tony Tony Chopper (Mikaela Hoover, N’Kone Mametja, and Gavin Gomes), who becomes her ward of sorts after her eccentric and impassioned friend and colleague, Dr. Hiriluk (Mark Harelik) dies.

While Sagal walked in knowing very little about Kureha, she was immediately drawn to the character. “She was such a badass, and also heartwarming and a little bit squishy on the inside. I found her young in spirit, even though she’s supposed to be 140. And what does time mean, really?” she says. “I loved that she was an older woman who just kept her shit together and wasn’t afraid to wear tight t-shirts.”

Her transformation into the character was shaped in large part by the costuming, hair and props,

'One Piece': Katey Sagal on Season 2 and Her Future in Show Universe