If you’re a Star Wars fan, speaking to legendary voice actor Corey Burton is usually a little scary. After all, on The Clone Wars, Burton was the voice of villainous Sith Lord Count Dooku, in addition to vicious bounty hunter Cad Bane. Neither character is somebody you’d like to satisfy in a darkish alley. (Or shiny road for that matter.) This 12 months, Burton reprised each roles to nice impact: Bane for The Book of Boba Fett, and now Dooku in Star Wars: Tales of the Jedi. io9 spoke to him concerning the latter.

In Dooku’s three-episode arc, we first see a very new model of the character: a younger, heroic Jedi Master with a younger apprentice by the identify of Qui-Gon Jinn, years earlier than the story we already know. In the second episode, Dooku begins to see cracks in his once-beloved Jedi Order, and by the top, we see him absolutely flip to the Dark Side, organising the Dooku from Attack of the Clones and, extra importantly, The Clone Wars, the place Burton supplied the voice.

Speaking to Burton final week, io9 was shocked to listen to that when the actor received the decision about Tales of the Jedi, his first intuition was to alter his Dooku. “My thought was, let’s do him like a young sort of Michael York, a young Shakespearean type,” he stated. “Forward looking, ambitious, but, you know, positive spirited. And so I had figured on doing a young, bright version. Sort of on a new kind of version of him.”

Little did Burton know that after recording began, his selection for the youthful Dooku was not what collection author and creator Dave Filoni had in thoughts. “I started out and I said, ‘Oh, well, what do you think of playing him young like this?’” Burton stated. “And I demonstrated. He was like, ‘Oh, no, no, no, just do Dooku. Our voices don’t change that much from young adulthood, if at all. Just play the character.”

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That route was nice by Burton, a veteran of the medium who, not like his Tales of the Jedi co-star Ashley Eckstein, doesn’t wish to get too wrapped up in Star Wars lore. “When I’m performing, and especially with something like this that’s very special, it’s all under wraps. There are no spoilers [and] I don’t like to have it spoiled for myself either,” Burton stated. “I like to be in the moment the character’s in. So I don’t like to know anything other than what the character knows within the framework of those particular scenes. I don’t want that to influence me if I know that Obi-Wan and Anakin and are plotting something.”

What he does is rely closely on Filoni and the group round him. “I’m very isolated,” Burton stated. “I’m very much in the skin of that character when I’m performing it. I don’t think about much else. And again, with Dave in my ear and in my head, I’m trying to, through him, be linked as closely as possible with what was in the writer’s mind. And I think together we accomplished that.”

Though Burton prefers to not look into Dooku’s backstory or take into consideration hyperlinks to Attack of the Clones, he’s excited by the present and relished the possibility to develop on a personality he’d been voicing for thus a few years. “I pride myself in being a craftsman, a craft worker. And every character and every production is this team effort,” he stated. “Dave is is the master storyteller. And, in serving that, hopefully I am bringing that to the microphone. And it all fits together and forms something really special. Something greater than the sum of its parts.”

Star Wars: Tales of the Jedi is now on Disney+

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