James Earl Jones had a unique voice: rich, deep and resonant, his rumbling bass lending itself to regal solidity, as in The Lion Kingor an impending threat, as in the original Star Wars trilogy. It was recognizable everywhere—which is why, when the spin-off miniseries Obi-Wan Kenobi premiered in the summer of 2022, fans quickly noticed something was wrong.

In September, Vanity Fair had reached the bottom of the mystery. The culprit? Artificial intelligence.

The magazine reported that Jones, then 91, had quietly stepped down from voicing Darth Vader. But to keep his iconic Sith lord a constant presence in that galaxy far, far away, he transferred the rights to his archival voice work to a Ukrainian startup. The company, Respeecher, then used AI to study the audio samples Jones had recorded over the years to “clone” his voice.

Matthew Wood, a longtime editor at Skywalker Sound, said he approached Jones with the plan after the actor, who died Monday morning at age 93, began talking about retiring from Vader.

“He had said he wanted to phase out this particular character,” Wood told the magazine. “So how do we move forward?”

Jones remained “a benevolent godfather” as Respeecher worked to recreate his vocal style, Woods said, and the team followed his advice to keep Vader, well, Vader.

Respeecher, founded in 2018, previously partnered with Lucasfilm to generate a younger voice for Luke Skywalker in the Disney+ series The Mandalorian And The Book of Boba FettSkywalker was physically played by a digitally de-aged Mark Hamill, then in his late 60s, with Respeecher overdubbing him with the synthetic voice.

Woods explained the process of creating the AI ​​Luke in a 2020 documentary: “I had archival footage of Mark from that time. We had clean ADR of the original films, a book on tape that he had done from that time, and also Star Wars radio plays he had done at the time.

“I was able to take clean recordings of that, feed them into the system, and they could slice it up and feed their neural network to learn this data.”

On Monday, the real Hamill tweeted, “#RIP dad” alongside a broken heart emoji. “One of the world’s finest actors whose contributions to ‘Star Wars’ were immeasurable,” he added in a statement to the Associated Press. “He will be greatly missed.”

Jones was asked by George Lucas to voice Vader during post-production of the first Star Wars film in 1977. The filmmaker had cast the physically imposing actor David Prowse to play Vader, but realized afterward that “he wanted a so-called ‘darker’ voice,” Jones later explained.

“Not in terms of ethnicity, but in terms of timbre. And rumor has it he was thinking of Orson Welles,” he continued. “But he probably thought Orson would be too recognizable, so what he ends up doing is choosing a voice that was born in Mississippi, raised in Michigan, and stuttered. And that happened to be my voice.”

Jones would reprise the role more than half a dozen times, including in four additional films. Star Wars movies, as well as The Star Wars Holiday Special, Rogue One: A Star Wars Storyand a handful of episodes of the animated series Star Wars Rebels.