Star Wars: The Clone Wars Actor Details His Inspiration for Maul’s Voice

Star Wars fans thought Darth Maul met his demise in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, only for the villain to reemerge in the animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars, as voiced by Sam Witwer. In the years since that return, the actor has voiced the character in multiple animated series and even in his live-action appearance in Solo: A Star Wars Story, with the actor recently recounting how he conjured the nefarious voice, which required the actor to not only honor what original voice actor Peter Serafinowicz crafted for his debut appearance, but also offer a more twisted evolution of the Sith.

“With Maul’s voice, it changes. Maul’s voice now is different than the younger Maul,” Witwer shared with IGN. “I always ask, ‘What era Maul are we doing?’… The older he is, he starts becoming more colorful and weird. Between the Serafinowicz voice that was established in The Phantom Menace, I took a lot from Palpatine. Because that’s his dad, really, so he would have learned a lot of things from Palpatine. His sense of humor is Palpatine’s sense of humor. When things are going well for these gentlemen, everything is hilarious. Only when things are going well.”

Maul finally met his demise at the hands of Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars Rebels, but given the sprawling nature of the galaxy far, far away, it’s hard to rule out ever seeing him in a new project. While there might not currently be any announced plans for the character, his appearance at the end of Solo teased that fans could expect more adventures featuring the character, with some rumors claiming that the character could even get his own live-action series on Disney+.

Despite the figure only appearing in one scene of Solo, Witwer recalled earlier this year how he knows the character so deeply that he had to collaborate with filmmakers to tweak the figure’s on-screen attitude from what was originally intended.

“There was stuff that had to happen once I got hired,” Witwer shared with SW Holocron. “There was a reshoot that had to happen because people like me and [Clone Wars and Rebels creator] Dave Filoni were letting them know there were a lot of details that weren’t consistent. That’s not me saying these people didn’t know what they were doing because they were making a movie and doing it at lightspeed. Ultimately, they did the right thing because they hired the people who were the experts on this like Dave Filoni and, I dare say, me, because I’m kind of an expert on what we’ve been doing with Maul for the past decade, y’know? They were very open to hearing what we had to say and, again, they were so open that they did a reshoot.”

He added, “Like I said, you can have the most talented people in the world and people can still drop the ball for a second. It’s always the willingness to go and pick it back up that I give people credit for. I don’t want to say that what Serafinowicz was doing was bad. It just didn’t sound recognizable as the character from The Phantom Menace nor the character from Clone Wars. It was a totally different thing. They needed people to recognize the voice, so there it is.”

Stay tuned for details on Maul’s possible future in Star Wars.

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