James Earl Jones, who died this week at 93, was one of the greats. Here are some of his roles we've been thinking about since the news.
The Simpsons
Every one of the (surprisingly many) James Earl Jones guest spots on The Simpsons proved a classic, but his narration of "The Raven" for the first "Treehouse of Horror" episode was in some ways the tipping point for the show's validity. Producers have said they initially had trouble getting established actors to do guest voices, and the show was conscripted into the culture wars by Barbara Bush–type conservatives as juvenalia that was ruinous to family values because of Bart's gentle delinquency. But neither of those were a problem for Jones, who was happy to bring his gravitas to a Poe-inspired segment—something that showed The Simpsons was for all ages, and could experiment with format in creative ways that paid tribute to the pop culture its writers grew up on, all without sacrificing any humor.
The segment itself is a fun little piece of meta-storytelling, with Lisa reading the poem to Bart—and Bart's skeptical comments about how scary something old-timey could even be—interspersed with a reenactment of the action where Homer is taunted by Bart the mischievous raven. It's Jones's narration that holds the piece together between the visual gags, his baritone familiar and commanding enough to hold the attention of this philistine child who thought poetry was boring. He made it weighty enough to feel like capital-C Culture yet conversational enough to convey that poetry need not be a foreign language—just, when it's done right, a musical one. I'm not going to go so far as to say James Earl Jones was the one who first taught me that poetry could be pretty cool. But I do think this was the first moment I flirted with what has become a lifelong belief that poetry needs to be heard, not merely read.
-Barry Petchesky
The Sandlot
I watched The Sandlot a lot growing up. I think I liked it so much because it understood better than any movie I had seen at the time how strange and mediated the experience of being a kid can be. To be 12 or 13 is to be constantly confronted with things you don't fully understand and circumstances that are not in your control. You have to move to a new town, because your step dad said so; you don't know what's behind that fence, because you're too small to see over it; you can't bear to consider what that adult really thinks of you, because you're not in any position to ask. The Sandlot understood how all of this can imbue childhood with a sense of anxiety and paranoia that adults don't even notice.
The Sandlot stressed me out, is what I'm saying. But like all good movies aimed at anxious tweens, it found the perfect way to release the tension it had built in the third act. That method was putting James Earl Jones on the screen to deliver the line, "I used to crowd the plate so the strike zone almost DISAPPEARED," in a way only he could.
Jones makes a brief cameo at the end of The Sandlot as Mr. Mertle, who up until that point the children in the movie only understood as a scary old shut-in who owned an even scarier gigantic dog. Once they end up inside Mr. Mertle's house, they realize that he is a blind former baseball player who just wants some companionship, and that his dog isn't even that big or scary.
It's a scene I still love because of Jones's performance. He used that voice and gravitas of his to project so many moods and emotions throughout his career, and here he uses it to put everyone at ease. In that one brief scene, Jones turns the movie's conception of childhood on its head—where once there was fear and uncertainty, there is now warmth and understanding and kinship. All it took to make growing up feel a lot less painful than it did before was a few seconds with James Earl Jones.
-Tom Ley
The Lion King
I must go with the basic answer because I believe James Earl Jones's Mufasa was both my first exposure to him and also maybe the first ghost I've ever seen depicted in film. I have a distinct memory of being three years old and eating animal crackers in my grandma's basement while watching The Lion King and feeling so moved by ghost/constellation Mufasa bellowing "reMEMber WHO you ARE" to Simba that my tummy hurt.
-Alex Sujong Laughlin
Mathnet
One of my favorite shows when I was little was Square One. The PBS show was produced by what was then called Children's Television Workshop, the brains behind Sesame Street, and taught viewers about math. Sometimes the concepts were quite advanced for a little kid! I learned simple fractions, probability, geometry, angles and other math topics from a sketch comedy show. I can trace my lifelong love of numbers back to Square One.
There were so many good segments. Mathman, a Pac-Man clone in a Michigan Wolverines helmet, advanced on the board by gobbling up right answers and avoiding wrong ones. (He usually lost, and was eaten by Mr. Glitch.) I remember Bobby McFerrin singing that I needed to know math to do basically anything in life. The show was absolutely aimed at adults, too, with parodies like Late Afternoon with David Numberman.
My favorite segment on the show was Mathnet, which aired at the end of episodes. The show was a parody of and homage to the 1987 Dragnet film with Dan Akroyd and Tom Hanks, itself a parody of and homage to the original 1950s TV show with Joe Webb. I didn’t know any of this, of course, but the show was its own comedy as well. Kate Monday (and, later, Pat Tuesday) was the straight-shooting cop, while George Frankly was the wise-cracking, occasionally bumbling sidekick. Watching some episodes this week, my wife and I laughed out loud several times at this children’s math cop show. Flashbacks were cited as “courtesy yesterday’s show.” They’d solve crimes using math! It ruled.
The chief on Mathnet was James Earl Jones. As Tim Burke pointed out, his role in Mathnet came directly after winning a Best Actor Tony as Troy Maxson in August Wilson’s Fences. Jones is only in a few episodes, but when the chief showed up, you knew it was going to be a big case. He helps Kate and George figure out "The Problem of the Passing Parade." He supports George in "The Trial of George Frankly." And he makes sure the crew solves "The Case of the Deceptive Data."
This is a bit of a stretch to pick as my favorite. Mathnet is no Pittsburgh Cycle. Clearly Jones is better in Fences. But the first time I saw James Earl Jones was when I was very little, as part of a show telling me about math in that wonderful voice of his. And when I make a math mistake, it’s probably in part because I wasn’t paying close enough attention to James Earl Jones decades ago.
-Dan McQuade
The Empire Strikes Back
Whole decades of Hollywood studio movies go by without a line-reading half as good or memorable as Jones’s freezing cold, deathly threatening delivery of “...but you are not a Jedi yet.” He hisses it. It’s terrifying.
-Albert Burneko
Michigan Football's Pregame Video
I never really fit in with big-time college football culture when I went to Michigan, and despite the presence of a Top 10 team on campus in my senior year, I gave up my tickets after one too many panic attacks in Michigan Stadium. Still, I hold some good memories of that place, and that’s partially thanks to James Earl Jones.
Since 2015, Jones’s voiceover has guided the hype video before the football team takes the field: “THIS,” he intones, “is the University of Michigan.” However, it’s not just a monologue about football; it’s a paean to the greatness of the Ann Arbor ground where we all walked, celebrating Michigan’s supremacy over its so-called peers while showcasing shots of countless iconic alumni. Jones’s booming voice gave conviction to the most bombastic, braggadocious phrases, like “We are the best university in the world!” It was a genuinely stirring experience, hearing that in a stadium of 100,000, forcing you to believe that everybody around you was special and lucky. It had to be true, because James Earl Jones said it.
-Lauren Theisen
Field Of Dreams
Every working actor’s job includes a healthy amount of improving material that is sorely in need of improvement. It’s inherent to the work, which is bringing words and concepts to life in a way that feels passably real if only for a few moments, in the dark. Sometimes you get to play Othello, but sometimes the job is doing a dance while wearing a costume that identifies you as Upset Stomach in a Pepto-Bismol ad. There’s nothing any less dignified about the latter gig, which is fundamentally the same work as the first, but I’d imagine that one feels a bit more engaging and ennobling than the other. Maybe you do the second one so you can do the first, or maybe you do the second one so you can pay your rent and buy groceries. But every actor who makes a living off their art is, at some point, going to do both.
James Earl Jones took a lot of paycheck roles, because he took a lot of roles in general; he was an actor and that was his job. I’ve seen him in a lot of those, and while I can’t tell you much about the specific performances he gave in, say, Exorcist II: The Heretic or the failed Thomas Ian Griffith star-making vehicle Excessive Force, because I have mostly forgotten those movies, I can vouch for the fact that I appreciated his presence and that he did what he was supposed to do, which was make some wobbly and undignified material seem much sturdier and more significant through the sheer gravity of his presence. He committed—his role in Exorcist II involved some very strange costumes and a decent amount of yowling—and stood and delivered and earned his paycheck, and the movie seemed better for the few moments he was in it. This was true of every single movie I ever saw him in.
But I think of it as being the most true for Field Of Dreams, which was a movie I loved as a kid and have struggled to watch for more than a few minutes any time I’ve happened across it since. This isn’t really taking anything away from the movie, which is the sort of silly, reverent, ostensibly-for-adults film that doesn’t really get made anymore, except I guess as biopics of extremely famous historical figures. Field Of Dreams is, conceptually, pretty ambitious and pretty wild, an efflorescence of boomer sentimentality that enfolds culture and counterculture and aging and forgiveness through a fable about baseball’s mythic power, which in the film is literalized as something supernatural and Ray Liotta-shaped. It is a big swing, and if it is for the most part a frosty mug of corn syrup, its headlong derangement is part of the charm.
For instance: The reclusive former novelist played by Jones is, in W.P. Kinsella’s 1989 book, quite literally J.D. Salinger. A threatened lawsuit from Salinger got the character’s name changed to Terence Mann in the film, but the character remains something of a sketch—a disillusioned icon of 1960s counterculture, mourning vaguely and in private, who gets back in touch with his inner child thanks to being kidnapped, in a nice way, by Kevin Costner. There are ways in which this could have been more interesting than it is, but this is not the sort of movie that would want to consider or even acknowledge why a once-radical black artist might have come to feel embittered and alone in Reaganite America. That’s not a criticism, really—it is just categorically not that kind of movie. And yet Jones, simply by being James Earl Jones, somehow manages to hint at those depths without ever disrupting the broader twinkling of the story. He elevates a character who is mostly a literary device into something sadder and more significant. He invests some truly goofy pap with a significance that makes the film feel, if only in his presence, more charged and meaningful than it has any right to be. Elsewhere he spikes some welcome bits of wariness and humor through what is otherwise very soft cheese.
It’s a silly role in a silly movie, a job like any other. The craft is in how artfully he makes it feel like something else.
-David Roth
