James Arnold Taylor

In Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008), Obi-Wan Kenobi strolls up to General Loathsom and offers to surrender. He does not mean a word of it, and the pleasure of the scene is all in the voice: unhurried, amused, faintly apologetic, the sound of a man who knows he is winning and has decided to be polite about it. It is Ewan McGregor's Obi-Wan, near enough, and the man supplying it is James Arnold Taylor, whose name most of the audience will not know and whose voice most of them have heard for years. That scene was the one stretch of a poor film we enjoyed without reservation, and we enjoyed it because Taylor was playing good manners as a weapon, which is what the rest of the script forgot Obi-Wan is for.

He came to the work by an odd road: stand-up at sixteen in Santa Barbara, then radio, then comedy writing in Los Angeles in the early 1990s. Games found him before films did. He was Tidus in Final Fantasy X (2001) and Ratchet in the Ratchet & Clank series from 2002, and he has stayed with Ratchet ever since. Obi-Wan arrived with the Star Wars: Clone Wars micro-series in 2003 and stuck: the 2008 feature, the television series that ran on from it, and Lucasfilm animation after that. In between he took the title role in Johnny Test (2005), an original part with nobody's voice to match.

Matching is a real craft, less glamorous than acting and harder than it sounds. Taylor has described the Obi-Wan job as beginning with pure imitation, "very specifically matching his voice, and all his little mannerisms and the way that he would talk", and only later becoming his own. You can hear the first stage in the 2008 film. He is a fair copy and no more, because the lines never ask for anything McGregor had not already done. A voice built to sound like another actor can only be as interesting as the scene it is handed, and Dave Filoni's film hands Obi-Wan one good scene and a great many announcements. Anakin and Ahsoka get the quarrels; Obi-Wan gets the briefings.

The limit of Taylor's work, then, is mostly the limit of the parts, and that is not nothing to say against a career. It is also why his best work is in places we do not review: long-running games and a long-running series, where a character voiced for years has time to stop being an impression. His most frequent colleague is Dee Bradley Baker, another actor whose face nobody knows and whose voice is everywhere, and the two of them are a fair picture of the profession: indispensable, well paid in credits, invisible. If you only meet Taylor in the 2008 film, listen for the surrender. It is the moment the impression becomes a performance, and it is over in a minute.