James Earl Jones Was Paid Just $7,000 To Voice Darth Vader In ‘Star Wars’

“George wanted, pardon the expression, a dark voice,” Jones said of director George Lucas’ plans for the 1977 film. “So he hires a Mississippi-born, Michigan-raised guy who stutters. And that’s the voice. That it’s me.”

Discussing the fee he was paid for the role, Jones said: “I lucked out of all these so-called disabilities for a job that paid $7,000! And I thought it was good money. And I ended up being a voice in a movie. “

In the same AFI interview, Jones said that when he returned for “The Empire Strikes Back,” the second “Star Wars” film released in 1980, he had planned to deliver a more nuanced vocal performance. Lucas, he said, disagreed and shut down his plans.

“He said, ‘We don’t know what we did right, so let’s try what we did.’ Of course, I wanted to make Darth Vader more interesting, more subtle, more psychologically oriented,” Jones said.

“And he said, ‘No, no. What we find is that you have to keep his voice on a very narrow band of inflection, because it’s not human, really.”

Disney used AI to recreate the voice of James Earl Jones in the “Obi-Wan Kenobi” TV series.

Jones reprized his voice role as Darth Vader in 2016’s Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and for a single line in 2019’s Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker. In 2022, Vanity Fair reported that Lucasfilm had partnered with Ukrainian AI company Respeecher to ensure the studio could continue to use Jones’ voice for future projects involving Darth Vader.

The technology was used for the Disney+ series “Obi-Wan Kenobi” in 2022. In it, Obi-Wan (Ewan McGregor) tries to rescue a young Princess Leia (Vivien Lyra Blair) from an Imperial group called the Inquisitors when he learns that Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) transformed into Darth Vader.

During an interview with Total Film, McGregor said that filming scenes with the iconic villain “scared him.

“I’ve never met Darth Vader,” McGregor said. “I had rehearsed the scene with Vader, but not with the helmet on or anything like that. When we came to do the scene, when they called “action,” he had to come up behind me. I turned around and went back with Darth. Vader was coming at me, it was like I was six years old again.”