The voice of James Earl Jones has entered the pantheon of Pop Culture, for having landed on an oh-so-iconic character. However, George Lucas toyed with – albeit briefly – the idea of entrusting vocal dubbing to a true legend of the 7th Art…
Darth Vader is ultimately four in one. If David Prowse slipped into the costume of the legendary Sith lord in the original trilogy, it was on the other hand the actor Sebastian Shaw who was filmed, still in the costume, in the lightsaber fight scenes, while Bob Anderson lent his features for the Return of the Jedi sequence where the character finally appears without a mask, defeated by his son and above all understanding his mistake.
And, of course, it’s also the inimitable and unforgettable voice of James Earl Jones. But before he cast his voice on this iconic character for eternity, George Lucas had considered a completely different actor. To be honest, an absolute legend of the 7th Art: Orson Welles.
From David Prowse… to Orson Welles
On the set of A New Hope, David Prowse recited his lines with his mask. The result was logically unconvincing, because his lines were muffled with this accessory. Darth Vader’s lines were therefore duplicated in post-production.
Prowse imagined he would be dubbing his own voice, but the production had meanwhile returned to Los Angeles after filming, and there was no question of bringing Prowse from England for the job. Too expensive. Not to mention the actor’s slight accent, which didn’t fit with the character.
Orson Welles’ voice was one of the most famous in cinema and of course on radio. A stentorian voice, deep and serious. He was thus the first choice of the Warner studio to voice OOM in THX 1138, but George Lucas insisted on taking someone less known, James Wheaton.
The filmmaker will therefore consider, later, entrusting the dubbing of Vader to the legendary actor-director of Citizen Kane. But he reached the same conclusion as at the time of his first film THX 1138: his voice was so well known that it was far too recognizable, and would therefore have been a handicap for this central character in his saga.
The humility of James Earl Jones
Very humble, James Earl Jones refused to be credited in the credits of the episodes A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back, believing that his contribution to the films was not significant enough. It will ultimately be credited to Return of the Jedi.
“Irvin Kershner gave me a K7 with the voice of David Prowse doing that of Darth Vader. It was absolutely frightening. When George came to advise me, he said to me: “I don’t know if we did the right thing, we’ll see what happens” said Jones. I naturally wanted to do something interesting, more subtle, with variations and all that. But George told me: “No no! You have to keep your voice on the same tone, because he’s not human.”
In an interview with the AFI in 2009, the actor revealed the very modest fee for a contribution that has gone down in cinema history: barely $7,000 for the first film; even if, by his own admission, this sum was very important to him at the time. The rest is history.