May the Fourth be with you! It’s Star Wars Day again, and in honor of one of the most popular and influential science fiction film series in history, I’m going to share clips from two of the biggest original stars talking about how they got their roles, with a bonus audition tape at the end.
From James Earl Jones’s surprising and hilarious reaction to his first view of an iconic Vader line to Mark Hamill’s (Luke Skywalker) confession that he did his whole initial audition without realizing who George Lucas was, the Star Wars actors’ memories and comments are a fun dive into the creation of the greatest villain and the greatest hero from the galaxy far, far away.
James Earl Jones earned accolades in everything from Shakespearean plays to animated films to fantasy movies to TV commercials. But in 1976, when George Lucas was filming the first Star Wars movie, Jones was not yet a legendary performer, though he had already earned awards by that time. Jones didn’t even receive credit for his voice work until the end of the original Star Wars trilogy, partly because he and George Lucas didn’t originally know what a smash hit that voice would be, and partly because Jones wanted to respect the work of the man who wore the Darth Vader suit and did the on-screen acting: David Prowse.
“I’m simply special effects,” Jones humbly described his contribution to Darth Vader. “George has recently admitted that when he hired David Prowse, he thought that was his Darth Vader. This guy who was over …six and a half feet tall, and fits in that uniform, the costume, with a slight Scottish accent, and not a bass, but more like a tenor. And he’s a very effective voice, but George thought he wanted a — pardon the expression, darker voice. So he hires a guy born in Mississippi, raised in Michigan, who stutters, and that’s the voice, and that’s me.”
Jones has been very open about his early struggles with stuttering, which he credited with forcing him to train his voice into the recognizable, mellow bass that movie fans know so well. “I lucked out, you know, from all these so-called handicaps, I lucked out to get a job that paid me $7,000,” Jones said. “And I thought that was good money, and I got to be a voice on a movie. It was great fun to be a part of that.”
In a separate interview, Jones noted how cavalier he was about his recording for Star Wars: A New Hope. Lucas had originally wanted Shakespearean actor Orson Welles for Darth Vader’s voice, then decided it would be too recognizable, ironic considering how recognizable Jones’s recording for Vader is now. “We spent about two and a half hours to do Darth Vader,” Jones said. “We didn’t know what we had, you know, and the second episode [Empire Strikes Back], we spent a whole day trying to figure out what we did right. And Lucas finally figured out what, you know, ‘don’t be too expressive’, [because] I was trying to improve on it.” Jones had plans for making Vader more “subtle,” but Lucas told him, “‘It’s all about a narrow band of expression.’ If you get too expressive, he seems too human.”
Jones remembered the Empire Strikes Back director Irvin Kershner giving him a recording the director had done of Vader’s lines, which caused the actor to think, “It was scary as hell. Kershner was scarier than I could ever be.” Fans wouldn’t agree! By that second film, Jones was taking more care with the role, however. “I looked [at it] like an actor would voice …lip syncing, but there was no lip, so I was lucky. I just watched his body language.” One of the most interesting admissions Jones made was about what is arguably Darth Vader’s most iconic line, which you can watch below. “When I first saw the dialogue that said, ‘Luke, I am your father,’ I said to myself, ‘He’s lying. I wonder how they’re going to play that lie out’.” Little did Jones know that Vader’s big reveal was genuine!
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As for Mark Hamill, he was still a very young actor, in his early 20s, when he went to try out for a role that has defined his whole career. “Well, it was a cattle call, meaning you go into a room and there’s 50 guys there, late teens for Luke and 35-ish and up for Han Solo,” Hamill remembered years later. “And I went into the room, and it was Brian De Palma sitting to my left and George sitting next to him. And it was one of those, ‘so tell us a little bit about yourself’. It wasn’t, you know, it wasn’t specific to the material… And after two or three minutes, they said, ‘Well, thank you very much.’ But, it was funny ’cause when I came out, I said — Brian did all the talking — and I said, ‘Who was that little guy with the beard that was sitting…?’ And they said, ‘That’s George Lucas.’” Oddly enough, while De Palma helped Lucas work out the world-building of the Star Wars universe, write the opening scene text crawl, and cast the original movie, that was the extent of his involvement with the films!
Hamill still seemed unsure years later what exactly stood out about the performance that earned him the role of Luke Skywalker. “The only thing I did that probably was the right choice, I thought, ‘I’m not gonna take it on …myself to play it arch, or like, it’s a Mel Brooks thing. I’ll just do it as sincerely as possible,'” Hamill said. “Now, it turned out by accident that was the right approach, but nobody told me that. No one said, ‘oh, he’s just an innocent farm boy, be sincere.’”
Even more fun, in my opinion, is Hamill’s interview from the set of the original movie, when he was still working on developing the character and before the public really knew what the movie’s story was going to be. While admitting he didn’t read much science fiction, Hamill expressed his enthusiasm for science fiction movies. “And I think that’s why I’m so excited to be in a film like this, because if I could pick any subject, this would be it,” the young actor stated. “And I think that Star Wars is really more than science fiction, it’s a wonderful, romantic fantasy story, like Wizard of Oz or any of those. So to me, it’s more than science fiction.” Interesting how even in the 1970s, the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz was still inspiring a new generation of actors.
When an interviewer asked if it was difficult to play a character who was entirely fictional, and therefore not a person in our real world, Hamill replied in the negative. “What George, the director, really wants us to do is play it exactly as if you were doing a story about a farm boy in Nebraska, and not on Tatooine, you know I don’t react like, ‘oh, my gosh, here’s a robot, and he’s walking, he’s talking’. It’s like a cow would be… It’s all these bizarre characters and semi-human, these humanoids, are the norm. So really… the hardest thing is trying to keep it very, just, off the cuff, and very normal.”
And finally, you might enjoy watching Mark Hamill’s screen test audition tape for Luke Skywalker, with Harrison Ford (Han Solo), the earliest sample of Hamill feeling out the character:
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