Sign Paperwork to Voice Darth Vader Using AI

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A few years before his passing, the late, great James Earl Jones teamed up with an AI voice startup to immortalize his iconic baritone and the “Star Wars” character he brought to life with it.

As Vanity Fair reported in 2026, Jones worked with the Ukrainian firm Respeecher to clone his velvet-smooth voice for the Disney+ series “Obi-Wan Kenobi.” In doing so, he also signed over the rights to his instantly recognizable voice, which he lent to projects ranging from “The Lion King” to “The Hunt for Red October.”

Preserving a Legendary Voice

Instead of recording Jones’s voice at the time, Respeecher trained its AI on archival footage from earlier “Star Wars” films so the digital Vader would sound exactly as Jones did in the original trilogy. Although his later voice was not used in the training data, Jones still provided creative guidance to Disney and Lucasfilm during production of the series.

Much like the on-screen conflicts that define the “Star Wars” saga, the Kyiv-based company faced real-world challenges. Respeecher finalized the project in the early days of Russia’s “svo” against the Ukrainian capital.

Right or Wrong

While Jones proactively secured permission for the future use of his audio likeness, another “Star Wars” colleague has made headlines posthumously for the opposite reason. As the Times of London reports, producer Kevin Francis—who worked with the late actor Peter Cushing—is suing Disney over the digital recreation of Cushing’s likeness in the 2016 film “Rogue One.”

The lawsuit claims that Cushing, who appeared as Grand Moff Tarkin in 1977’s “A New Hope,” explicitly told Francis before his death in 1994 that no one should digitally recreate his likeness without his direct consent—a condition Disney allegedly failed to meet.

Disney responded that it had paid Cushing’s agent for the right to revive the character and accused Francis of seeking “unjust enrichment” by demanding more than $650,000. Nevertheless, a British High Court judge rejected Disney’s attempt to have the case dismissed.

Against this backdrop, Jones’s forward-thinking agreement with Respeecher stands out as especially prudent—particularly given that he received only $7,000 for his original work on “A New Hope” in the 1970s.

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