James Earl Jones had a unique voice: rich, deep and resonant, his booming bass gave the royal robustness, as in The Lion Kingor threatening threat, as in the original star Wars Trilogy. It was recognizable everywhere – which is why, when the spin-off miniseries Obi-Wan Kenobi premiered in summer 2022, fans quickly noticed that something was wrong.
Until this September Vanity Fair had gotten to the bottom of the mystery. The culprit? Artificial intelligence.
The magazine reported that Jones, then 91, had quietly retired from his role as Darth Vader’s voice, but to ensure his iconic Sith Lord remained a presence in that galaxy far, far away, he transferred the rights to his archived dubbing to a Ukrainian startup. The company, Respeecher, then used artificial intelligence to sift through the sound bites Jones had recorded over the years to “clone” his voice.
Matthew Wood, a veteran Skywalker sound editor, said he contacted Jones with the plan after the actor, who died Monday morning at age 93, began talking about retiring his Vader.
“He had mentioned that he was looking into the retirement of this particular character,” Wood told the magazine. “So how do we proceed?”
Jones remained “a benevolent godfather” while Respeecher worked to restore his singing style, Woods said, and the team followed his advice to keep Vader, well, Vader.
Respeecher was founded in 2018 and has already worked with Lucasfilm to find a younger voice for Luke Skywalker in the Disney+ sister series. The Mandalorian And The Book of Boba Fett. Skywalker was physically played by a digitally rejuvenated Mark Hamill, who was then in his late 60s, and dubbed with the synthetic voice by Respeecher.
In a 2020 documentary, Woods explained the process of creating the AI Luke: “I had archive footage of Mark from that time. We had cleanly recorded ADRs from the original films, a book on tape that he had made from that time, and then star Wars Radio plays that he had made at that time.
“I was able to make clean recordings of it, feed it into the system, and they could split it up and feed it to their neural network to learn that data.”
On Monday, the real Hamill tweeted “#RIP Dad” alongside a broken heart emoji. “One of the world’s finest actors whose contribution to ‘Star Wars’ was immeasurable,” he added in a statement to the Associated Press. “He will be greatly missed.”
Jones was hired by George Lucas to play Vader in the middle of post-production of the first star Wars The filmmaker had cast the physically imposing actor David Prowse for the role of Vader, but realized after filming that he “wanted what was called a ‘darker’ voice,” Jones later explained.
“Not in terms of ethnicity, but in terms of timbre. And rumor has it that he was thinking of Orson Welles,” he continued. “But he probably thought Orson might be too well known, so he ended up choosing a voice that was born in Mississippi, raised in Michigan, and stuttered. And that happened to be my voice.”
Jones took on the role more than half a dozen times, including four more star Wars Films and The Star Wars Christmas Special, Rogue One: A Star Wars Storyand a handful of episodes of the animated series Star Wars Rebels.
