POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
It’s hard to look back on the first time I saw Star Wars as a 7-year-old child and remember with any accuracy what it was about Darth Vader that most scared me. It was probably a combination of his use of the Force and his unpredictability. One of the interesting things about the original Star Wars is that as much as we hear about the Force from Obi-Wan Kenobi, demonstrations of its potential power come almost entirely from the villain. And they’re shown to us right away: Vader levitates that Rebel leader and snaps his neck within minutes of the film’s opening.
Meanwhile, we won’t even meet Old Ben Kenobi for another half hour. And when we do, he uses the Force to do little things like a quick mind trick here and there. It is, to apply the parlance of Gen Z, “cute,” where Vader’s is very clearly brat.
And for as much as he looks like a robot, Vader is 100% a creature of emotion. His feelings are so volatile, we never know what he’s going to do next.
The seething fury of Vader, the brooding sense of threat and the wicked sense of humor—“I find your faith disturbing,” he says languidly, as he chokes one of his colleagues out—all of that came from James Earl Jones.
Jones was never meant to play Darth Vader. British bodybuilder and actor David Prowse had been cast in the role. During the filming of Star Wars, Prowse had been asking what they were going to do about Vader’s voice. Speaking from within the helmet, his voice sounded so muffled. Lucas reassured him, they would rerecord his part after filming ended.
What he didn’t say was he wasn’t going to use Prowse to do it. Prowse only found out his voice had been replaced when he saw the film.
Over the years clips have been released showing what Prowse sounded like. They are generally devastating. Prowse’s soft English voice simply has none of the gravitas of Vader. At his best, he sounds like an office manager having a tantrum.
But again, Prowse was speaking in a helmet, and he had been told that his voice was going to be rerecorded. Many years later, a documentary was made in which the filmmakers altered Prowse’s voice in post. It’s striking not only for how closely modern technology could have given Prowse that dark baritone Lucas wanted, but also how deep Prowse gets on his own. He clearly could have done a lot, had he been allowed. I actually think the soft lilt of his British accent also adds a certain quality to the performance, a kind of delicious malevolence.
For his work voicing Vader, which took a few hours, Jones got $7000. And he felt it was so important that the credit go to Prowse, he refused to have his name included in the credits for both Star Wars and its first sequel, The Empire Strikes Back. His name appeared for the first time only at the end of Return of the Jedi.
Lucas would continue to keep Prowse in the dark as the saga went on. He was not told that Vader was going to reveal that he was Luke’s father even as they filmed that scene. Prowse’s script actually included an entirely different set of lines: “Luke, we will be the most powerful in the galaxy. You will have everything you could ever want... do not resist... it is our destiny.”
Mark Hamill was in fact the only one on set that knew, having been told just before the scene was filmed. I have to think when he saw how big Hamill went in the scene, Prowse had to wonder why.
On the set of Return of the Jedi a reporter from the Daily Mail likewise told Prowse about the death of Vader being shot somewhere else—and again, not with him. Prowse was stunned. After three movies of being erased, he had seen that moment as validation.
(Afterwards, that reporter falsely attributed the story about Vader dying to Prowse. After the story broke, Prowse said, he was a pariah on set. Lucas didn’t invite him to official events after that, and as far as I can find they never reconciled.)
The way that Sebastian Shaw got hired to play Old Anakin maybe didn’t help. Shaw was a friend of Sir Alec Guinness, and he’d gone to Guinness wondering if there might not be any work for him on Star Wars, as he’d fallen on hard times. Guinness went to Lucas. Lucas told him he could have Old Anakin if he wanted.
Showing up for his scene, Shaw apparently ran into his friend Ian McDiarmid, who played the Emperor. McDiarmid asked him what he was doing here. According to McDiarmid, Shaw said, “I don’t know, dear boy, I think it’s something to do with science fiction.” He had no idea what Star Wars was.
It’s terrible that Lucas didn’t at least give Prowse a shot at that last scene. But at the same time Shaw’s performance is pretty astonishing.
There’s so much emotion in his eyes. And his delivery is so gentle. The choice to let us see him as a Force ghost at the end, too, is so unexpected and powerful. We begin the saga confronted with this raging, inhuman creature. And here he is at the end, every bit a human being now, a father looking lovingly on his son.
After the prequels Lucas reedited this ending to include Hayden Christiansen rather than Shaw, which in addition to being just another example of Lucas being unnecessarily shitty to his performers makes absolutely no sense. Christiansen’s age doesn’t match with the others or Vader at the point of his death. Also Christiansen very clearly was not directed to offer the kind of emotional connection to Luke that the scene was meant to create. In fact Lucas just took a leftover shot of Christiansen, which helps explain why he’s looking down and around, not even at Luke. Also why it’s so ridiculously short.
I will say—in the recent TV mini-series Obi-Wan, the climax involves Obi-Wan smashing Vader’s helmet and seeing Anakin inside it for the first time. And while this is Anakin at a very different moment in his life than in Return of the Jedi, it is a tremendously emotional moment, and a brilliant nod to Shaw and Hamill’s performance.
Jones died earlier this week, the last original piece of this Frankenstein’s monster that was Darth Vader. Apparently before he died he gave Disney permission to continue to use his voice for Vader by way of AI. Which I think is a great irony, because what made his performance so endlessly thrilling was precisely the fact that it was so authentically human. We might not have known why he was so angry, and he looked so strange, but still, his feelings were so familiar.
I wonder if they didn’t come from a very real place for Jones, too. As a child Jones didn’t speak from the time he was in his first grade until into his freshman year of high school, because of a severe stutter. “One of the hardest things in life is having words in your heart that you can’t utter,” he said later. Vader seems far more liberated, both in word and action. But he has the never-ending rage of a man who feels trapped.
Listening to the clips below, you can hear how Jones savors the words, and finds in them so many different colors—a bit of wit here, a thoughtfulness there, and always, always that sense of threat.
AI might be able to reproduce some of those sounds, but I find it hard to believe it will be able to reproduce that sense of relish. The relish of a man who found in acting the pathway to his own voice and freedom.
May he rest in peace.
You may notice I’ve been trying something a little different the last few weeks, a short-ish essay or thoughts rather than a bunch of news items. Feel free to let me know what you think!
MOMENT OF WOW
In 2014 The Big Bang Theory did an episode in which James Earl Jones goes with Sheldon to Ding-Dong-Ditch Carrie Fisher. It’s a great moment.
In fact, Jones had never met Fisher before. Lucas being Lucas, he had never invited Jones to the set.
When Fisher saw Jones for the first time, she threw her arms wide and said, “Dad!”
See you later this week.