Legendary actor James Earl Jones is using artificial intelligence to keep the voice of Darth Vader alive.
The actor, who will turn 92 in January, indicated he wants to retire from voicing Vader. To that end, he allowed sound design studio Skywalker Sound and a Ukraine-based AI sound design firm called Respeecher to keep his iconic voice alive in future Star Wars projects, Vanity Fair reported. The outlet also revealed that, while Jones is credited with voicing Darth Vader in the “Obi-Wan Kenobi” TV show, it was the AI recreation that actually provided his voice for the show.
“He had mentioned he was looking into winding down this particular character,” Skywalker Sound supervising sound editor Matthew Wood said of Jones. “So how do we move forward?”
Wood turned to Respeecher. The firm uses AI algorithms and archival voice recordings to recreate voice performances from old and deceased actors and other public figures. The company previously worked with Lucasfilm to recreate the voice of a young Luke Skywalker for the Disney+ series “The Book of Boba Fett,” and Skywalker Sound enlisted the firm’s help to recreate Darth Vader’s voice the way it sounded when Jones debuted the character in 1977’s “A New Hope.” Wood told Vanity Fair that they hired Respeecher because of the firm’s uniquely lifelike vocal recreations.
Voice work for Vader began before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Wood had previously recorded Jones on a number of occasions throughout the years, most recently for a brief line of dialogue in the 2019 sequel film “The Rise of Skywalker.” Wood, showrunner Deborah Chow, and the Respeecher team in Ukraine were transferring hundreds of files back and forth on a regular basis, fine tuning and making minor changes to the dialogue. “For a character such as Darth Vader, who might have 50 lines on a show, I might have a back-and-forth of almost over 10,000 files,” Wood said.
Respeecher speech artist Bogdan Belyaev told the magazine that the firm was finishing its work right when the Russian invasion of Ukraine began on February 24. “If everything went bad, we would never make these conversions delivered to Skywalker Sound,” he says. “So I decided to push this data right on the 24th of February.”
As the invasion commenced, Wood began to pull back his stringent demands on the Ukrainian team. “Certainly my main concern was their well-being,” he said. “There are always alternatives that we could pursue that wouldn’t be as good as what they would give us. We never wanted to put them in any kind of additional danger to stay in the office to do something.” But the team was more than willing to work, even though some of them were working in the war-battered cities of Lviv and Kiev. Wood recalled the team’s attitude: “[l]et’s work, let’s work in the face of this adversity, let’s persevere.”
When the final product was released in May of this year, Jones’ family told Wood that they were very pleased with their work bringing Vader’s voice back to life. Jones himself was credited as the voice of Darth Vader, but Wood described his role as that of a “benevolent godfather.” Since then, 91-year-old Jones has signed off on allowing Respeecher and Skywalker Sound to use his archival voice recordings in future projects. Jones will maintain his “godfather” role, giving the team advice on how to portray Vader, Vanity Fair reported.
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