James Earl Jones had a singular voice: Rich, deep, and resonant, his rumbly bass lent itself well to regal sturdiness, as in The Lion King, or ominous menace, as in the original Star Wars trilogy. It was recognizable anywhere—which is why, when the spin-off miniseries Obi-Wan Kenobi premiered in the summer of 2022, fans were quick to notice something was off.
By that September, Vanity Fair had gotten to the bottom of the mystery. The culprit? Artificial intelligence.
The magazine reported that Jones, then 91 years old, had quietly stepped back from voicing Darth Vader. But in order to allow his iconic Sith Lord to remain an ongoing presence in that galaxy far, far away, he signed over the rights to his archival voice work to a Ukrainian startup. The company, Respeecher, then used AI to pore over the sound bites that Jones had recorded over the years in order to “clone” his voice.
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A veteran Skywalker Sound editor, Matthew Wood, said he approached Jones with the plan after the actor, who died Monday morning at the age of 93, began talking about retiring his Vader.
“He had mentioned he was looking into winding down this particular character,” Wood told the magazine. “So how do we move forward?”
Jones remained “a benevolent godfather” as Respeecher worked to recreate his vocal stylings, Woods said, with the team following his advice to keep Vader, well, Vader.
Respeecher, founded in 2018, previously worked with Lucasfilm to generate a younger voice for Luke Skywalker in sibling Disney+ series The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett. Skywalker was physically played by a digitally de-aged Mark Hamill, then in his late sixties, with Respeecher overdubbing him with the synthesized voice.
Explaining the process of creating the AI Luke, Woods explained in a 2020 documentary, “I had archival material from Mark in that era. We had clean recorded ADR from the original films, a book on tape he’d done from those eras, and then also Star Wars radio plays he had done back in that time.
“I was able to get clean recordings of that, feed it into the system, and they were able to slice it up and feed their neural network to learn this data.”
On Monday, the real Hamill tweeted, “#RIP dad” next to a broken heart emoji. “One of the world’s finest actors whose contributions to ‘Star Wars’ were immeasurable,” he added in a statement to the Associated Press. “He’ll be greatly missed.”
Jones was tapped by George Lucas to voice Vader in the midst of post-production on the first Star Wars movie in 1977. The filmmaker had cast the physically imposing actor David Prowse to play Vader, but realized after wrapping that “he wanted a so-called ‘darker’ voice,” Jones later explained.
“Not in terms of ethnic, but in terms of timbre. And the rumor is that he thought of Orson Welles,” he continued. “But he probably thought that Orson might be too recognizable, so what he ends up doing is picking a voice that was born in Mississippi, raised in Michigan, and was a stutterer. And that happened to be my voice.”
Jones would go on to reprise the role more than half a dozen more times, including in four more Star Wars films, as well as The Star Wars Holiday Special, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, and a handful of episodes of the animated show Star Wars Rebels.
