The read
As a boy, James Earl Jones stuttered so badly that he spent years barely speaking, until a teacher lured the voice back out with poetry. What came back became the most impersonated bass in cinema. Measured in ordinary conversation, the register is exactly as advertised: average pitch and chest-register share both optimal, the energy anchored low and resonant. The surprise is everything around it. Vader’s slow, deliberate menace is nowhere in the man: twenty pauses in two and a half minutes, not one lasting a full second, and a melody swinging through more than an octave and a half. The depth is his. The stillness was always a performance.