Matt Lanter takes on the voice of Anakin Skywalker, a role played by Hayden Christensen in the live-action movies. James Arnold Taylor voices Obi-Wan Kenobi, played as a young man by Ewan McGregor in the other films. Tom Kane voices Yoda, taking over from Frank Oz.
The reasons? Star Wars: The Clone Wars started out as a television film and the first installment of the upcoming animated TV series. The producers told a news conference at Lucasfilm Animation's Big Rock Ranch in Marin County, Calif., on Aug. 4 that the actors needed to be available. And they also needed to work for less money.
"When we started the project, it was, as George said, initially a television series, and we needed to be able to work at a pace [that] was pretty rapid," producer Catherine Winder said. "And the way that we write this is we rewrite, we change it, and we need to be able to access our actors pretty regularly. So it was hard to get all the actors that would be off on set, because this pace is pretty intense."
"You need people available every week," Lucas, Clone Wars's executive producer, added. "And you can't really afford, you know, multimillion-dollar actors to do a television series. ... The license fee on your average television series is about $200,000. You know, it's nothing. So those guys make more during their coffee break."
Jackson, Lee and Daniels signed on after the decision was made to produce the first bit of The Clone Wars as a full-fledged feature film, Lucas added. "We went back to the [original] actors and we said, 'OK.' We told them we were doing the TV series, just so they knew, as a courtesy. But then we said, 'Look, we're doing a feature. Would you like to do the voice in the feature?' And some of them said yes. Some of them were off doing [other] features. Because this all was, again, done fairly rapidly. It wasn't like we said, 'OK, next June we're going to do this.' It was like, 'Could you come in in a month, in four weeks, and do this? Could we have two days?'"
Lucas confessed that big-name actors would have contributed more than the current ones mainly for their press value. "They simply use them--they have two days in the studio or three days in the studio, and then they have, like, three weeks doing press," Lucas said. "So they're mainly paid for the press stuff, they're not really paid for doing the movie."
