When you think about the voice of Yoda the name that immediately comes to mind is Frank Oz, but others have voiced the character including Tom Kane, Piotr Michael, and John Lithgow. Lithgow recently caught up with Collider’s Steve Weintraub for the film The Rule of Jenny Pen, and he spoke about not only remembering every detail about playing Yoda but also the hilarious way in which he first landed the role.
“I was acting in a play on Broadway directed by John Madden, who very soon became a major film director, who directed, among other people, Geoffrey Rush in Shakespeare in Love. He was directing me in Beyond Therapy on Broadway, but in those days, he was a very successful radio director, and they’d hired him to do The Empire Strikes Back radio production. He had Billy Dee Williams and Anthony Daniels and Mark Hamill, but Frank Oz had chosen not to play Yoda because he was very doctrinaire about only using his voice when he used a puppet—not unlike Dave Crealy, I might add.
So John was pissing and moaning over lunch one day during a rehearsal break that he couldn’t find a Yoda, and I said, [Yoda imitation] ‘Oh, impatient is he?’ And I got the role like that! I’d been watching Sesame Street with my kids for years, with Grover, Frank Oz, running up to the camera, [Grover imitation] ‘Now, I am getting closer. Now I am getting further.’ That’s how I got the role of Yoda in the radio production, and I couldn’t thank you more for bringing that up.”
It’s been almost 30 years since Lithgow voiced Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back radio dramatizations, and while he never took on the role in live-action, his career has certainly not suffered from it. Lithgow is a two-time Oscar nominee for his work in The World According to Garp and Terms of Endearment, which saw him nominated in back-to-back years at the Academy Awards. More recently, Lithgow has become famous for his performance as Ben Hull in Life Is Strange, the 2014 romantic drama starring Alfred Molina and Marisa Tomei. He is also known for his work as the Trinity Killer in Dexter, and his performance was such a hit that it warranted a Trinity spin-off, which Lithgow will return and lend his voice to. He will also star as Dumbledore in the next generation of Harry Potter stories.
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