It was revealed last week that writer/director Kevin Smith provided a voice for one of the Stormtroopers in J.J Abram’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Having spoken about visiting the set while doing his Hollywood Babble-On show in London in 2014, it was assumed he was asked to the voice work there. But it turns out, Smith was asked well into post-production, and occurred from their altercation at San Diego Comic Con when Abrams took the entire Hall H to a free Star Wars concert before Smith had his annual panel.
“The weekend we were at Comic Con and I was doing my Hall H thing,” Smith explains on the latest Hollywood Babble-On podcast. “And before me was J.J with Star Wars and he said, ‘who would like to go and see a Star Wars concert right now?’ and he took everybody. 6,000 people left and I was like, ‘no one is here’. There are pictures of me talking to Hall H and it’s empty as fuck. ”
Backstage, someone told Abrams about Smith’s panel, and according to the director he was mortified. “He came up to me and was like, ‘dude I had no idea, I didn’t know anyone was after us, let alone someone I fucking love’,” Smith continues. “And I was like, ‘don’t worry about it’ and he was like, ‘no I feel like Darth Vader’. I said, ‘go do your concert I’ll be fine, let’s take a selfie together to commemorate the worst fucking moment of my life’. So he went off to the concert and kept hitting me with emails all weekend but I never replied. What am I going to say? It was such a first world problem.”
Being the sort of man Smith is, he used his public platform to share the story. “So I talked about it on two shows after it happened,” he says. “First show I did was Jay & Silent Bob Get Old down in San Diego and then Hollywood Babble-On. And by the time we got to Babble-On, I’d refined that fucking horrifying incident into a fun little anecdote, and I wrapped it up with, ‘Sith happens but fucking J.J had better cast me as a fat Stormtrooper in the next fucking Star Wars film’. It was a throwaway joke. The next fucking day I get an email from J.J. saying, ‘I just listened to Babble-On, we have to do that’. He said, ‘they’ve all got voices – come in and do a voice’. I wrote him back and said, ‘normally I would you don’t have to do that, but you have to fucking do that’. You don’t owe me anything, but I want that more than anything in life. Who’s cock do I have to suck? I went into Bad Robot, and he pulled four or five scenes and had me record a bunch of lines and they would pick one in post. But the most fucking exciting thing was that I got to see some of the scenes before the film was out.”
Abrams, however, didn’t tell him which take they’d chosen. “When I saw the movie I didn’t know which one it was,” he jokes. “I was cock-sure after I saw it four times at the theatres was that I was the one who goes, ‘traitor!’, but then I read that and found out I was this other guy.”
SEE ALSO: Pre-order Star Wars: The Force Awakens via Amazon UK or Amazon US
Originally published February 2, 2016. Updated January 18, 2020.
