THE VOICE WILL BE WITH YOU, ALWAYS (#112, OCT 2009)
Scott Chernoff says “Hello there” to James Arnold Taylor as he talks about voicing Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars: The Clone Wars along with hundreds of other characters, and the time he was nearly silenced—forever.
He’s the heroic Green Arrow Batman: The Brave and the Bold, erstwhile friend Harry Osborn on The Spectacular Spider-Man, Ratchet of the hit series of Ratchet & Clank videogames, and the new voice of modern Stone Age family man, Fred Flintstone.
But there’s one achievement that towers over the others for voice actor James Arnold Taylor: He’s finally fulfilled his life-long fantasy of playing a major role in the Star Wars saga, starring as Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars: The Clone Wars.
“I lived and breathed Star Wars as a kid,” Taylor says. “We played all the time—but I was always Han Solo. If somebody told me I was going to be Obi-Wan Kenobi, I would have been like, ‘Wait, I’m the old guy?’”
But despite his tremendous success performing literally hundreds of cartoon characters and videogame voices over the last two decades, Taylor told Star Wars Insider that it nearly all slipped away. “About four years ago,” he reveals, “I lost my voice completely due to toxic mold in our home. When the doctor said, ‘You can’t speak,’ I was like, ‘Uh, that doesn’t work.’”
The incident was a stark reminder of just how precious Taylor’s instrument—his voice—is to him. “I had to start over and change my whole life,” he recalls. “I trained with a gentleman who trains opera singers. I had to learn how to re-use my vocal chords in new and exciting ways.”
EARLY INSPIRATION
Luckily for Taylor—and his fans—the hard work paid off. “I’m stronger now than I’ve ever been. Sometimes, you need something like that to break you down, just to rebuild yourself,” he says.
Now back in the game with three animated series on the air, Taylor is free to pursue the one thing he always loved. “I’ve known since I was four years old that I wanted to do the voices of cartoons,” he says, noting that he drew inspiration from legendary performers like Mel Blanc (who voiced virtually all the Looney Tunes characters), Daws Butler (Yogi Bear), and Don Messick (Scooby Doo and many more). “I was glued to all those guys and memorized their vocal inflections,” he recalls.
“I never had any aspirations to be an on-camera actor—I always wanted to be a voice actor. The truth is I’m the luckiest guy in the world to be able to make my living doing what I always wanted to do.”
STARTING OUT
Taylor started out doing impressions as a stand-up comic and radio disc jockey when he was just 16, moving south to Hollywood from his native Santa Barbara, California, as soon as he got out of school. His first break came in the obscure world of voice doubling, re-recording small bits of dialogue for famous actors who were too busy to come in when a small line needed to be changed. He got a job filling in for Michael J. Fox on the Disney animated feature Atlantis—and soon found himself taking over the lead role entirely for the sequel, Atlantis: Milo’s Return. “I just have a knack for picking up voices,” he shrugs.
Among the stars Taylor has doubled for videogames and feature film looping are Johnny Depp, Billy Bob Thornton—and Ewan McGregor. He started voicing Obi-Wan Kenobi for the first Clone Wars TV micro-series in 2002, then went on to Star Wars videogames and now the new hit TV series, Star Wars: The Clone Wars.
“Originally, it was to be an exact voice match for Ewan McGregor,” Taylor says. “We basically have the same sound, the same range. So I thought that rather than trying to sound like him, since I know I already do kind of sound like him, I’d just do what he did: try to sound like Alec Guinness. So I started thinking of how he would talk, and I tried to ‘young it up,’ and went, ‘OK, so if I was casually speaking as a young Obi-Wan, I might sound like this.’ I didn’t concentrate so much on sounding like Ewan McGregor as much as I concentrated on sounding like Obi-Wan Kenobi, the character we all know. That seemed to work.”
Taylor explains that for him, focusing too much on precisely matching a specific voice can get in the way of a good performance. “You can get hung up on a voice match where you try too hard to sound like the person and it becomes a caricature. It becomes more the nightclub comic’s impersonation. You want to relax in the voice. You really have to understand how that person would act, and you have to be able to act that way. I always have to envision how he would deliver the line. It’s more than an impersonator would do, because you have to understand the character and be able to say anything in that voice.”
That approach sat well with Clone Wars director Dave Filoni and Star Wars creator George Lucas. “After we’d started the series and done the film, Dave and George said, ‘You have the freedom now to take this and make it your own thing,’” Taylor recalls, adding, “Dave’s vision for Obi-Wan in this series is very specific. He’s trying to show Anakin the right way, but he’s also the calm in the storm. I’m always the straight guy. Most of the time, I’m pulling the reins back on Anakin and Ahsoka, so I’m like the older brother. Nothing really gets to him. But at the same time, I know people may think sometimes he’s a little too reserved, so I’m trying to give him some excitement. Every once in a while, I torture myself and read the message boards, and some people do think he’s got to lighten up. But I just think, ‘Give him time.’ There’s something that happened in a second season episode we did recently, and I can’t really get into it, but it made me think, ‘Oh, we get to see different facets of Obi-Wan in this.’ I’m playing a side of Obi-Wan that nobody’s really seen before.”
UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL
Taylor thinks that the epic scope of Star Wars: The Clone Wars is allowing a far more personal glimpse of Kenobi than fans have ever seen. “He’s such an iconic figure,” he says, “but you don’t know anything about his personal life. We have many episodes, so now the writers have been exploring those areas. How does he act when he’s gotten up on the wrong side of the bed and he’s having a bad day? What’s his day-to-day relationship with Anakin? It’s been fun to work with everybody and create those parts of his life and his characteristics. I try to put a little of the reserved old Jedi living alone in this deserted part of a desert planet, and the young one who was in the world and so much a part of everything.”
At the same time, Taylor has gotten to give voice to a host of other Star Wars characters, from fan favorite Plo Koon (“Dave said, ‘Think Gandalf,’”— he recalls) to espionage droid 4A-7 (“A whiny, high-pitched guy”) and the medical droid from The Clone Wars movie (“That’s me doing kind of a Jeff Goldblum type voice”).
“That’s another great part about being a voice actor,” he says. “You get to be so many different characters all the time.”
A REWARDING ROLE
All those characters add up to more reasons Taylor is grateful to have re-gained his voice in time to continue his work in the Star Wars universe. “I’m a geek when it comes to this stuff,” he said. “I’m a fan as much as anybody else, so I get into the story, and to me, Star Wars: The Clone Wars is as good as Lost or any other great show. I can’t wait to see the next season, just like everybody else.”
Thinking back on his journey, Taylor adds, “It’s so rewarding. I get so much fan mail from people all over the world, and I’m not trying to sound corny but it moves me—because I’ve always been a fan, and I’ve sent fan letters to people I respect and gotten autographs before, too. So when I get letters from people about how they’re sharing Star Wars with their kids, and they’re thanking me for helping them see this whole universe in a different way, I kind of trip out on it. Daily, I go, ‘Wow, I’m involved in this world, and not just on the sidelines—I’m really involved in the Star Wars universe.’ It’s a great honor.”
