Justin Chatwin was selected to play the film's central character Goku. Ron Perlman was originally offered the role of the villain Lord Piccolo, but turned it down to work on Hellboy II: The Golden Army. James Marsters, who accepted the role, noted he was a fan of the original anime series, describing it as "the coolest television cartoon in the last 50,000 years [because] it’s got a Shakespearean sense of good and evil." Summarizing the original concept of Piccolo, he said the character was "thousands of years old and a very long time ago he used to be a force of good, but [he] got into a bad argument and was put into prison for 2000 years. It got him very angry, and he finds a way to escape and then tries to destroy the world." Originally, Piccolo was going to be depicted as a handsome creature, but Marsters and the make-up artist chose to give him a decrepit complexion to reflect his having been trapped for thousands of years. The first time the make-up was applied, it took seventeen hours and left Marsters with difficulty breathing. In subsequent applications, it generally only took four hours.