Dragon Knight Lead Writer Nathan Long on Adapting Kamen Rider Ryuki

Novelist and screenwriter Nathan Long served as lead writer on Kamen Rider Dragon Knight, the 2009 American adaptation of Kamen Rider Ryuki produced by Steve Wang and Mike Wang. In an interview conducted around the show’s original run, Long walked through how he ended up on the project and what it took to turn fifty episodes of Japanese footage into a coherent American series.

Long’s background was in prose fiction before television. He had written several Warhammer novels for Black Library’s Blackhearts and Gotrek and Felix lines, plus tie-in fiction and one game module, alongside a handful of screen credits including Guyver: Dark Hero, co-written with longtime collaborator Steve Wang. That prior partnership is how he ended up on Dragon Knight: Wang called him directly and asked if he wanted to head-write the show.

He came onto the project after the pilot was already shot, inheriting Wang’s concept: a group of Riders from a world called Ventara, defeated before the series begins, alongside a second group from Earth recruited by the villain Xaviax. Long’s job was making that premise hold together over a forty-episode arc, including reconciling the existing Ryuki action footage with an entirely different plot: episodes where two Riders fought side by side one week and tried to kill each other the next had to be explained through in-story loyalties and rivalries worked out after the fact.

Long was blunt about why the show adapted Ryuki’s footage rather than shooting original action: budget. Reusing existing fight scenes was far cheaper than filming new ones, and Kamen Rider carried name recognition an original American show wouldn’t have had. Within that constraint, he said the writing team deliberately avoided a straight translation of Ryuki’s plot, in part because American children’s television couldn’t carry over the original’s more violent Rider-War concept, and in part because they wanted something that came from their own ideas rather than a diluted copy. He and the Wangs pushed back against network requests to lighten the tone or add more comedy, arguing that Kamen Rider had never been built as a bouncy team show in the Power Rangers mold and that the Ryuki footage itself didn’t support that kind of story.

Asked about the cast, Long singled out Matt Mullins, who played Len, and William O’Leary, who played the villain Xaviax, for particular praise, Mullins for growing into the role as the show progressed and O’Leary for both his performance and for mentoring the newer actors on set. Long also credited O’Leary with helping bring Carrie Reichenbach into the series as Kase, and noted that Mike Moh, cast primarily for his acting, turned out to have real martial-arts ability the production put to use.

On his own process, Long described writing daily with tea and a Conan soundtrack running in the background, and offered a short set of rules for aspiring writers he said he’d written down for a nephew: write every day, finish what you start, listen to real feedback, read widely, expect and push through rejection, and build relationships with the people who actually buy scripts, something he said he’d neglected early in his own career.

Long also confirmed that the writing team had left the story open enough to continue past its first season if the network wanted more, though that decision was never theirs to make.