The following is an excerpt of an interview with James Arnold Taylor, the voice of The Clone Wars' Obi-Wan Kenobi, featured in issue #112 of Star Wars Insider Magazine which is on sale now. For more information and to subscribe visit titanmagazines.com/starwars.
He's the heroic Green Arrow on 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."
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."
A REWARDING ROLE
Taylor has gotten to give voice to a host of other Star Wars characters, from fan favorite Plo Koon to espionage droid 4A-7 ("A whiny, high-pitched guy") and the medical droid from The Clone Wars movie. "That's another great part about being a voice actor," he says. "You get to be so many different characters all the time."
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."
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