91-year-old actor James Earl Jones has voiced the iconic villain Darth Vader for over 40 years, and now he is stepping away from the character. While Star Wars fans are accustomed to seeing digitally de-aged characters like Mark Hamill in The Book of Boba Fett now is the time for the voices of some legacy actors to be digitally recreated via A.I. In a new report, Vanity Fair, has revealed that not only Jones has stepped back but has also “signed off” on using his archival voice recordings to keep Vader alive.
Darth Vader had a substantial part in Disney+'s Obi-Wan Kenobi series, and fans noticed his voice sounded considerably different in the series. That is because Lucasfilm brought in a Ukraine-based company called Respeecher to reconstruct new Vader dialogue for the series. The company previously worked with the studio for Luke Skywalker's voice in The Book of Boba Fett, however, the ongoing war severely made matters worse when it came to Obi-Wan Kenobi. Their synthetic-speech artists were still working on Vader’s voice when the war broke out, nonetheless, they soldiered on to finish the project.
On the receiving end was Lucasfilm’s veteran supervising sound editor Matthew Wood, who has worked with Jones a dozen of times in the past decade, including when he last recorded a brief line of dialogue for 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker. He recounts that the actor had “mentioned he was looking into winding down this particular character.” That posed the pertinent question, “So how do we move forward?” Nonetheless, given the access to the A.I. technology he presented Jones with Respeecher’s work, and per the report, “the actor signed off on using his archival voice recordings to keep Vader alive and vital even by artificial means.”
Jones famously overcame a childhood stuttering impediment to become one of the most iconic voices in movie history, and not only as Vader. Fans of a certain age will remember he also voiced Mufasa The Lion King. He started his film career with Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film Dr. Strangelove and has had an illustrious career spanning six decades. He is also a celebrated Broadway artist and bagged a Tony Award for The Great White Hope and Fences. He later reprised his The Great White Hope character for the 1970 film adaptation earning him Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations. He last appeared on Broadway in the revival of D.L. Coburn’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, The Gin Game with Cicely Tyson.
While many fans had expected Jones to step back from voicing Vader given his age, sadly, we now have confirmation. You can check out our conversation with Ewan McGregor about the Obi-Wan Kenobi series below: