The voice actor behind Luke Skywalker in LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga says the LEGO Group asked him to ‘tone down’ his performance.
While early dialogue-fuelled LEGO video games pulled lines directly from the movies, 2022’s The Skywalker Saga features a bunch of original lines – which meant bringing in an entirely new cast for the franchise’s most iconic characters. Video game veteran David Menkin, whose credits include Final Fantasy XVI and Pragmata, assumed the role of Luke Skywalker during the original movies, and has now shared a little insight into the creative process.
“Taking on such an iconic role involves pooping yourself,” Menkin joked on a recent episode of the PlayStation Access podcast, “and thinking ‘someone, somewhere, made a mistake’, because I’m not an impersonator. I’m an actor. So I have to find a way to make it work. I had heard that this project was going on, and I was like, ‘I’ve been doing a Luke my entire life,’ because I love Star Wars.
“I got my agent to say, ‘David thinks he can do this.’ And we got a reply and it said: ‘Prove it.’ So I went and I recorded every single iconic line over the weekend, and then I got the job.”
The actor brought a specific sort of intensity to Luke’s dialogue across A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, but it was – at times – a little too intense… at least for the LEGO Group.
“I remember going into these sessions, and you know, I get to say, ‘I’m a Jedi, like my father before me,’” he added. “And I’m going, ‘does anybody else have chills? Just me?’ And they’d be like, ‘Yeah, okay, can you just do a slightly more upward inflection at the end?’ The best moment of it all was when we did the ‘Luke, I am your father’ scene.
“Apparently I did it so convincingly that [the LEGO Group] got back to us and said, ‘It’s too scary. He needs to tone it down.’”
If you haven’t played LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga (or just want a refresh given it’s four years old now), you can watch the final cut scene by hitting play below. And to be fair, Menkin’s delivery is still pretty intense – fittingly so for the gravity of the scene, and compared to Mark Hamill’s original performance – so it’d be interesting to hear what that original take was like. Unfortunately, we’ll probably never hear it…
Speaking of Hamill, Menkin also spoke a little more broadly about the pressure of taking on one of the most iconic roles in cinematic history.
“When someone tips Hamill off and he says, ‘Welcome, David Menkin,’ you then realise that it also involves sitting at a table and just sweating a lot,” he said. “Just sweating. That’s all I could do for about 10 minutes. And then you get on with your day, because it’s your job.
“It is so weird that I get to do this kind of stuff for a living. But it is so daunting, so scary, so exciting and so adrenaline-fuelled, that you can’t possibly do anything else. I have no transferable skills.”
Listen to Menkin talk a little more about LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga and the rest of his career to date in the latest episode of the PlayStation Access podcast over on YouTube.
The next LEGO video game coming our way, more than four years on from the release of The Skywalker Saga, is the similarly ambitious
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