Frank Oz Talks About Coming Up With How Yoda Speaks in STAR WARS
Frank Oz’s resume is filled with several wonderful and iconic puppet characters that he has brought to life over the years as a puppeteer and a voice actor. One of his most legendary characters is Yoda from Star Wars. It’s hard to imagine what Yoda might have sounded like had Oz not stepped into the role. The character would have most likely turned out to be completely different!
Oz is the one who actually coined Yoda’s formal yet convoluted syntax, for example, “Smaller in number are we, but larger in mind.” When talking about coming up with the way Yoda talks, Oz shared:
“It’s funny you ask about that because I was just looking at the original script of The Empire Strikes Back the other day and there was a bit of that odd syntax in it, but also it had Yoda speaking very colloquially. So I said to George [Lucas]: ‘Can I do the whole thing like this?’ And he said: ‘Sure!’ It just felt so right,”
Well, it worked! This is one of the main things that makes Yoda such a unique, different, and charming character. I don’t know if anyone other than Oz would have thought to push forward that aspect of the character.
When asked if he ever gets tired of the endless terrible Yoda imitations, he said, “No I’m used to it. But people don’t understand, anyone can do a voice. It’s not the voice – it’s the soul.”
And the soul of Frank Oz is the soul of Yoda. He’s the one and only true voice of the character.