Corey Burton on How He Approached Voicing a Younger Dooku in ‘Tales of the Jedi’
The new animated anthology series Tales of the Jedi, now available on Disney Plus, brought back Count Dooku into the animated Star Wars landscape. The character, who was key to the plot of The Clone Wars, appeared in the new series in his younger years, giving us an opportunity to see his slow turn to the Dark Side over the course of three shorts. Corey Burton, who voiced the character in The Clone Wars (and also provided the iconic voice of Cad Bane in animation and live-action), recently discussed in an interview with Slash Film his time working on Star Wars, and how he approached the younger version of Dooku.
Burton, who was inspired to get into voice acting because of Paul Frees, has been involved with Star Wars for many decades. As he told Slash Film, he did some ADR work on Empire Strikes Back, which was when he met Mark Hamill. But that wasn’t the only time he crossed paths with a live-action Star Wars actor. Years later, when George Lucas was working on animated movie Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Burton was temporarily brought on to do the dialogue for Count Dooku before Christopher Lee was to record the lines. After listening to Burton’s work, Lee said “Are you sure you really want me to do this? Because this guy’s really good.” lee still voiced the character in the animated movie, but Burton got the job for the series. The actor said the following about that story:
“I don’t think from what I heard that he was all that keen on doing that job anyway, it’s just that one of the actor’s agents saw that there was this movie and in their contracts, all of the film actors had the right of first refusal. So they replaced [me], which was very disappointing because at one of the first Star Wars: The Clone Wars sessions, Dave [Filoni] said that George [Lucas] had listened to all our tracks and had seen the first bits of animation and he had a message for the voice cast. George had said, ‘I’m not doing movies anymore. This is now Star Wars. And this voice cast, you are now the official characters. So play it the way you would play it. Don’t imitate the original actors, but do your own natural version of it. You have license now. You sort of own these character voices now since it’s now animated.'”
Burton then explained the main difference, to him, between a voice performance in animation and a full performance in live-action, and how the animated medium allows the actors to interpret the character in a slightly different way:
“In animation especially, it depends upon the production itself. Usually, you want to be a little bit more black and white for an animated production, especially something that’s more cartoony, is going to be more exaggerated and a little bit more projected. Whereas, as The Clone Wars series developed and then later in Book of Boba Fett, it became a more cinematic performance, a more nuanced characterization; playing it more from more of an internal close up version of the character as opposed to something that is splashed up onto a big screen in a more theatrical form. Being cinematic, as I say, is sort of a macro performance where you’re letting the microphone capture more of the soul of the character, more of the vocal nuances that come from not pushing the performance out, but trying as much as possible to just be the character and let the character exist within you sort of and let the microphones capture that.”
He also revealed that, when he first got his hands on the lines from Tales of the Jedi, he started reading them with a different tone, as the character was many years younger than in The Clone Wars animated series. But Dave Filoni wasn’t up for that idea, as Burton explained:
“When we first started recording for these Tales of the Jedi, I had the idea that he’s much younger. So I should play him all sort of squeaky clean, naive, and fresh and innocent. So I started with this young Shakespearean sort of carefree, happy-go-lucky character. And Dave was like, ‘No, no, no, no. What are you doing?’ He said, ‘No.’
I said, ‘Well, he’s younger. Shouldn’t he sound younger?’
‘Oh no. He would always really basically sound the same, so just play Dooku. Just play it younger.’
‘Oh yeah, you’re right.’
So most of it, again, is in the writing. And as the character is visualized as younger, it will sound according to how it was conceived by the writer. There’s conscious decisions to change so much anything about the approach to portraying the character. It’s all guided by the tone that’s right there in the words.”
Burton also explained how, while recording The Clone Wars, a lot of the back-and-forth between the cast and George Lucas or Dave Filoni would be classic-movie references, which is sort of how his voice for Cad Bane came to be:
“He’s a blend of Peter Lorre and spaghetti western bounty hunter, looming, sinister, tough guy characters. Peter Lorre in the Old West is the way I perceive him. But yeah, so much in The Clone Wars incidental characters or supporting roles or whatever parts that pop up here and there, Dave will say, ‘Yeah, yeah, why don’t you do this? You got anything? Here’s a guy who’s like a bartender from whatever.’ And I’m thinking like, ‘Oh, you mean Sheldon Leonard from…’ I don’t know if it was It’s a Wonderful Life or whatever.
Robert Stack. Robert Stack’s not necessarily old movies and TV shows. Well, I guess everything’s old now since I am somewhat. Some of the best, funniest little bits that we’ve done, I think, have been classic movie character actors that I based the voices on.”
Finally, when asked about his favorite moments across his Star Wars work, he couldn’t resist from picking any Cad Bane moment:
“Well, it is hard to pick favorites. What’s your favorite child? I have loved them all. I do especially love Cad Bane, because it’s an original creation between myself and Dave and George Lucas. And then now in The Book of Boba Fett, there was some influence from Robert Rodriguez, who I’ve known for many years. I’m his movie trailer voice, Robert Rodriguez presents Grindhouse, which is a send up of all those exploitation movie trailer voiceovers.
[I’m proud of] so much of Clone Wars and Book of Boba Fett and I think of Bad Batch as just an offshoot of Clone Wars, which it is I guess. And I’m proud of all of it, especially when I see it animated so beautifully.”
Tales of the Jedi is now streaming on Disney Plus. You can check out Miguel’s review of the six episodes here.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as movies from Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
