Entertainment
Star Wars Actor's Career Was Destroyed By A Bizarre Lie
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
While James Earl Jones provided the iconic voice for Darth Vader, it was bodybuilder David Prowse who actually wore the intimidating suit, using his prodigious height to absolutely terrify moviegoers around the world. Sadly, Prowse had an epic falling out with franchise creator George Lucas that began with the actor telling a bunch of fans in 1978 that Vader was Luke Skywalker’s father.
This led to Prowse getting iced out of the franchise that made him famous and even banned from official Star Wars conventions, but here’s the wild part: he had no idea what the plot of The Empire Strikes Back was going to be at the time, and he told fans a lie about Vader being Luke’s Daddy that ended up being true completely by accident!
The Force Was With Him
It all started in 1978, when over a thousand fans came to Berkeley to see David Prowse, who had become famous thanks to the success of the first Star Wars movie. He answered fan questions and told them when the second film would go into production and that it would be followed by another sequel. Of that third movie, Prowse proclaimed that Luke and Vader would square off in a “do-or-die lightsaber duel” and that “Father can’t kill son, son can’t kill father.”
In retrospect, this whole thing seems crazy; Prowse just casually spoiled the big plot twist of The Empire Strikes Back (Vader’s declaration of “I am your father!” to Luke Skywalker) two years before the movie came out. However, things aren’t actually that cut and dry. The sequel film was still being written at the time, so Prowse would literally have no way of knowing that Vader was Luke’s father.
His Lack Of Faith Disturbed George Lucas
Nonetheless, Prowse’s comments were published by The San Francisco Examiner. Surprisingly, the apparent spoilers for the next Star Wars movie didn’t travel very far, barely making a ripple in the fandom (man oh man, things were different before the internet!). Nonetheless, George Lucas resented Prowse for spilling the beans, and he took drastic measures on the set of the next film, including giving some Empire actors fake scripts to prevent leaks and even giving Prowse fake dialogue for the movie’s biggest scene.
You see, David Prowse didn’t actually say “I am your father” when filming this famous scene with Mark Hamill; he’d later claim that the line he was given was a fairly generic “come and join me and the Dark Side.” Hamill was told what the real line would be only right before they shot the scene, allowing him to properly emote. Prowse, meanwhile, had to find out alongside everyone else when he saw The Empire Strikes Back in theaters!
The Man Behind The Mask
The Darth Vader actor accidentally spoiling this big reveal two years earlier might have made George Lucas paranoid, but they didn’t have a proper falling out until production of Return of the Jedi. This was the movie where Vader would finally be unmasked, and David Prowse assumed he would be the man beneath the mask. In a truly bizarre twist, he wouldn’t discover otherwise until a journalist came to the gym and bluntly asked if the actor knew that he was getting killed off and that Sebastian Shaw would be playing the unnamed Vader, which he proved by examining Prowse’s call sheet.
This news was very upsetting to Prowse, but things went from bad to worse the very next day when The Daily Mail ran a story with the headline “Darth Vader to be killed off in the next movie, in an interview with David Prowse.” This caused George Lucas to believe Prowse had leaked another major spoiler to the press, and the actor later claimed that he was immediately “ostracized” on the set of Return of the Jedi, with both the producer and director refusing to work with him. Lucas stopped talking to him altogether over this, though Prowse has always maintained his innocence.
Still, being ignored by Lucas didn’t make Prowse any less popular with the fans, and he continued to make appearances at official Star Wars conventions. But in 2010, he appeared in The People vs. George Lucas, a documentary that severely criticized the creator of everyone’s favorite galaxy far, far away. That same year, Lucas officially cut any remaining ties with Prowse, and the actor was banned from attending official conventions.
David Prowse Gets Completely Removed From Star Wars
Before his death, David Prowse claimed he was never paid the residuals he was owed for Return of the Jedi, something which could possibly be a result of his epic falling out with Lucas. Because of this and the fact that his career was so irrevocably tied to Star Wars, the actor relied on fan conventions for most of his income. Official conventions like Star Wars Celebration helped him earn much of the money he needed to support himself and his wife, so getting banned from them was a severe financial blow.
However, Prowse might not have gotten banned from these conventions if Lucas didn’t still blame him for the press leak about Vader dying, and Lucas might not have so readily blamed Prowse for that if the actor hadn’t told a bunch of fans that Vader was Luke’s father way back in 1978. Prowse had no way of actually knowing that, however, and made up a complete fabrication that just happened to come true. In this way, a bizarre lie ended up completely ruining the career of the man behind the most famous villain in Hollywood history.