Filming on home soil wrapped up faster than expected.
What came next was the real marathon: a globe-spanning shoot that, on the surface, looked like work, but underneath felt suspiciously like a luxury tour financed by the studio. First Hong Kong, then Singapore, India, Pakistan, the Arab world… and finally, the last and most important stop.
Online, the global reaction followed the usual pattern. People cursed, complained, swore they would never support it, never watch it, never give it a chance. But the moment any new update about the live-action adaptation of an anime property surfaced, everyone clicked anyway. Out of irritation, curiosity, or pure instinct. In the end, no one could resist.
That was how Alex's first photo hit the internet like a bomb.
He was dressed in a heavy black overcoat with an almost military edge to it, a rigid cap set high on his head, so tightly fused to his hair it looked like part of him. His broad chest and dense muscle strained the tank top beneath the coat to an almost absurd degree, as if the fabric might split apart at any second. The makeup subtly reshaped his features, giving him a slightly more Western look, but it was still him. Unmistakably him.
And that was exactly what left everyone stunned.
Wasn't Part Three supposed to mark Dio's return?
Then why was Alex standing there in that dark-haired, dark-clad look, with that cold expression and that nearly brutal presence?
And above all… when had he gotten that huge?
The image spread across the internet in minutes. Shares exploded, forums erupted, timelines flooded. After all, since Death Note had never been officially released domestically, most of the audience still held onto one very specific image of Alex: Sosuke Aizen seated upon his throne in immaculate white, elegant to the point of unreality, cold, refined, untouchable.
That was the Aizen people remembered - the one with razor-sharp lines, philosophical dialogue, and an air of superiority so complete it never had to be announced. It simply filled the room on its own. Plenty of fans joked that he wasn't really a villain at all, but a philosopher dressed like a king.
And now, all at once, that "philosopher" had become something else. No less intimidating, but far more physical. Heavier. Denser. More oppressive. As though he had abandoned words entirely and decided to crush the world with his bare hands instead.
Once it became obvious that the discussion online had already caught fire, Alex didn't hesitate. Rather than hold anything back, he released more official cast photos.
The reaction got even worse.
Or rather, even better.
Alex as Jotaro Kujo. Mark as Kakyoin. Bell as old Joseph. Henry as Polnareff.
The second Henry's image dropped, a lot of people simply lost the ability to form coherent sentences. The exaggerated hair was striking enough on its own, but it was everything else that truly stole the show. The costume framed his body so perfectly it bordered on surreal, as if he had stepped straight out of an illustration. The shape of his chest, compressed by the outfit, carved out such outrageous lines that it looked like visual exaggeration - except it was real.
Brutally real.
Some women went silent staring at the screen.
Some men closed the tab out of sheer discomfort.
And an entire crowd finally understood that the nickname "Bo-Bo" had never been a joke.
As for Alex and Bell, neither of them had taken it easy in training, either. Bell lived up to his near-legendary reputation in Hollywood as a "rubber man," the kind of actor capable of shifting between gaunt and wiry or thick and heavily built with a kind of ease that felt almost inhuman. The truly absurd part was that Mark, who had once played young Joseph, somehow ended up looking less imposing than Bell did as the elderly version of the same character.
That comparison alone was ridiculous enough to become a meme.
And then there was Mark.
Even though he stood just over six feet tall and had followed Alex's instructions to the letter - carving out his abs, defining his arms, sharpening every line of muscle - he still looked almost slender standing beside that group of monsters, all of them hovering around six-foot-three and built like reality had been bent slightly around their frames.
The comments exploded.
Some said certain fitness influencers, the ones who spent all day selling their image online, had become a complete joke the moment Alex entered the comparison. Some pointed out that Mark would have looked perfectly commanding in any other production, but here he seemed like he belonged to a completely different visual genre. Others joked that in Part Three, Sosuke Aizen wouldn't even need illusions anymore - he could just start throwing punches and wipe everyone out through brute force alone.
And inevitably, the defectors began to appear.
People admitting, against their own will, that they were starting to get excited. Because it was not normal to see someone destroy their body like this for a role. Worse still, everyone knew that after this, Alex would have to strip all of that mass back down again to return to playing Aizen with the lean, blade-like elegance the character demanded.
Just imagining the process was painful.
Of course, there were still people trying to preserve the boycott, reminding everyone of the so-called pact they had made - not to watch anything until Part Three of Bleach finally happened. But the truth was embarrassingly simple.
The photos had already won that battle long before the premiere.
Because in the current industry, most young actors sold "muscle" through camera tricks, padded suits, or costumes designed to fake the illusion. Who, in their right mind, would willingly torture themselves until they looked like that?
Unless, of course, they planned to turn the suffering itself into a marketing strategy.
But with Alex, it felt different.
There were no shortcuts there.
Only obsession.
Two months later, at the final stage of the journey, the production entered a completely different phase.
After nearly two full hours in the hands of a world-class makeup artist hired at an outrageous price, Alex finally stepped out of the dressing room.
And the entire set froze.
It was not an exaggeration. Not a figure of speech. For a few seconds, the atmosphere genuinely stopped moving.
Because the man who had entered that room was Jotaro.
The one who came out… was Dio.
The transformation was so complete it triggered a very specific kind of unease - the kind that appears when the brain recognizes someone and, at the same time, refuses to accept what the eyes are seeing. The face was the same, but it wasn't. The posture was different. The energy was different. Even the silence around him felt heavier somehow.
"Mark, let's rehearse."
The voice came out firm, and the impact was immediate.
When he played Jotaro, Alex used a low, heavy register - something almost stone-like, a presence that imposed itself without effort, like a wall no one could hope to break through. But now it was different. There was magnetism in that voice. A living arrogance. Something almost sensual, almost theatrical, yet still dangerously convincing.
Mark blinked, forced himself out of the daze, and tried to respond, but the sense of unreality lingered.
For the past two months, he had weathered storm after storm alongside Alex's Jotaro. Fought with him, run beside him, faced danger with him, built scene after scene of intense, almost visceral camaraderie. But the figure standing in front of him now was no longer that silent ally with the iron expression and crushing fists.
Now, he was the man who was going to kill him.
Mark had always known his time on set was running short. He had known this sequence would be the end of his journey there. Because Kakyoin would die here.
And even knowing that from the beginning was not the same as facing it head-on.
Alex called him over and began explaining the core emotional mechanics of Kakyoin's death with total seriousness, like someone who understood exactly how much weight that moment carried.
"When you fall, your eyes need to carry three things at once," he said. "Longing for your parents back home. Attachment to your friends. And the absolute resolve to defeat Dio, even if it's the last thing you ever do. If even one of those is missing, the whole scene loses power."
Mark listened in silence, nodding again and again. His looks and polished screen presence had never been his greatest weapon. What truly held him up was skill. And he knew how to recognize someone standing in front of him who understood a character down to the bone.
But once filming truly began, even he was dragged under by the sheer force of Alex's transformation.
Jotaro and Dio were both overwhelming characters, both wrapped in crushing presence, but the nature of that weight was entirely different. One was total restraint. The other was excess in its purest form. One was silence compressed until it turned into steel. The other was domination flaunted without the slightest shame.
And yet Alex moved between the two without a trace of fracture.
Not a single false note.
Standing on the rooftop across from him, already fully inside the scene, he tilted his chin upward, folded his arms across his chest, and gave Mark a crooked, mocking smile - the kind of elegant contempt only a predator absolutely certain of its own superiority could wear.
"You're afraid of me, aren't you, Kakyoin? Just like you were a year ago."
The line fell through the air like a thin blade.
"You're too young to throw your life away serving that old man Joseph. Is it really worth it?"
Watching Alex in that state was unsettling. Not just because of the costume or the makeup, but because his entire being seemed to have been rearranged from the inside out. The man who had played Jotaro with dry, contained heaviness now radiated something far more sinister - a savage charisma, a pride so intense it was almost intoxicating.
Mark's heartbeat sped up before he even realized it.
And when he answered, he was no longer just acting.
"That's a lie. Back then, I really was afraid of you… but I'm not that person anymore."
His voice grew stronger as he went on, as if the character himself were rising from somewhere deep inside him.
"I'm not fighting just to repay what Mr. Joestar and Jotaro did for me. I'm fighting so I can say goodbye to the weakness I used to be. So I can bury, once and for all, the person I was."
That exchange did not exist in the most familiar version of the story. Alex had pulled it from an older adaptation because he understood exactly what it revealed: Kakyoin's death was not merely tragic. It was a conclusion. A late awakening, but a complete one. Proof that when faced with the end, he had finally come to see himself clearly.
Then came the attack.
"Take this, Dio! Twenty-Meter Radius Emerald Splash!"
Under normal circumstances, shouting the name of a special move in the middle of an empty set, with no soundtrack and no visual effects added yet, would have been almost humiliating. The kind of thing that made even viewers curl up from secondhand embarrassment if it was done badly. In almost any other production, it would have sounded artificial, forced, disconnected from reality.
But somehow, in Alex's work, that barrier simply vanished.
Maybe because no one there approached it with cynicism.
Maybe because the world he built demanded complete surrender, and anyone who stepped inside it had to accept its rules all the way through.
Back in the early days of Bleach, when the actors still felt awkward shouting their weapon release commands in the middle of scenes, it had felt ridiculous too. Embarrassing, even. But little by little, that discomfort disappeared. The body adapted. Emotion took the place of shame. And Alex, an unapologetic fanatic when it came to this kind of story, had never struggled with it in the first place.
If anything, he thrived on it.
And when Dio's turn came, he suddenly raised a single finger, the movement exploding with such force of presence that it seized the entire set in one instant.
"Fool!"
His smile spread wide - arrogant, radiant, magnificent in its madness.
"Then witness for yourself the true power of The World… the power capable of ruling the world itself!"
And then Alex, utterly consumed by the energy of that moment, shouted with fierce, almost feral exhilaration, as though the name itself carried the weight of an age about to turn:
"Za Warudo!"
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- CHRONICLES OF THE ICE SOVEREIGN
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