James Earl Jones: The Man Behind The Voice

Q: Were you involved with Vader's heavy breathing?

A: No. I don't know who added the sound of breathing. It was bionic breathing, not related to speech at all.

Q: Do you feel frustrated or amused at getting so much attention for a part you never played?

A: I'm just glad I was a part of it.

Q: What did you think of Star Wars when you saw it?

A: Before I understood the mythic element, I thought it was simplistic. When my boy was three I watched it on video with him. He looked at Darth Vader and he looked at me, and he just hated that I was the bad guy. Darth Vader scared him very, very deeply. So I was affected by that.

Q: When did you become aware of the myths and legends it borrowed from?

A: Raymond St. Jacques was the first black person to voice the question, "What's going on here? You look up and in these other galaxies there are no black people. The only one who seems black is Darth Vader, because he sounds like James Earl Jones. Does that imply that the only blacks in the galaxy are evil forces?" I'd always said that black actors should exploit mat: we should play Mephistopheles, we should take advantage of all that mythology that black is evil. It wouldn't be too healthy, I suppose, but it made me start to examine it from a mythic point of view.

Q: What, if anything, did you learn from those films?

A: You should be able to boil any good story down to its mythic elements. That's what makes it universal.

Q: How learned in the Force are you?

A: I never bought Darth reaching out and, without making contact, making a guy choke. But what I learned then about mysterious forces was confirmed later in Field of Dreams. When you're dealing with a mysterious force, don't try to explain it. That's what Lucas knew--it was a mysterious force, you just let it be.

Q: Could you appreciate any of the performances in the Star Wars trilogy or did the technology overwhelm the individual characters?

A: [Laughs] I love Chewbacca. He was my favorite.

Q: Are you allowed to use Vader's voice on your own?

A: No, I really can't. Nor can they use it arbitrarily without my permission. I've taken on a speaking career, where I go to colleges around the country. I get invited because I've been Darth Vader and Mufasa [The Lion King]. The first time I gave a speech was at Yale, where I compared the rightwing militia to the left-wing radical groups of the '60s. I thought I did a good job. But they didn't give a shit. It was the Yale forum, where after your speech, two sides debate, and they wanted me to do it as Darth Vader. Really!

Q: Of the first three films, which did you like best?

A: The first one. And I'm looking forward to the new one. All I had to do was see a picture of little Natalie Portman with that makeup and it made me feel, aaahhhh! I love when the imagination just explodes. See, I was also in Conan the Barbarian, which dealt with another time and place far, far away. I love that stuff of dreams.

Q: Do you think that by the third prequel, Anakin Skywalker will have become Darth Vader and your services will be needed again?

A: I asked George Lucas: do I get to work? He said, "Yeah. In the third one, when Anakin becomes bionic, he'll sound like you." That might only be the last five minutes of the movie, but it's fine with me.

Q: When you first saw Star Wars were you as impressed with how you sounded as the rest of us were?

A: I've only been impressed with my voice work in an animation called The Flight of the Dragons, about 20 years ago, where I played two dragons. I'm not impressed with Darth Vader or the CNN thing.

Q: Some say this voice made you more famous than anything else you've done--do you see this as ironic?

A: Oh yeah, it's full of irony. And the fact that I once was mute.

Q: You developed a stutter when you moved with your grandparents to Michigan, didn't you?

A: I attribute it to that, and an incident with my Uncle Randy, who had epilepsy. He would pass out and go rigid on the floor. Once while he was passed out, my grandmother told me to go to the store, about a mile away, to get a doctor. There'd been a blizzard the night before and all the roads were closed with five feet of snow, and when I got to the store I was overwhelmed and couldn't get anything out to the storekeeper.

Q: How bad did your stuttering get?

A: There were times when I just went totally mute. Randy, you see, besides having epilepsy, also was a stutterer and I used to mock him. So I felt maybe the law of retribution happened. But I accept the fact that I will always be a stutterer. A lot of stuttering rights organizations say that stutterers shouldn't be made fun of. I don't agree. Stuttering is funny.

Q: How did you deal with racism as a child?

A: I did not want to be a victim of paranoia. I knew very early, from my indoctrination with my grandma, that that was no way to live. I wanted to be a realist.

Q: Did anyone ever make you feel inferior?

A: No. To feel inferior, you've got to be pretty jerked around in all kinds of ways for that. Racism is a form of profound insanity. And any excessive racial consciousness is also the same breed of insanity. "Black is Beautiful" is insane.

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