James Earl Jones Having ‘Fascinating’ Time in Return to Broadway
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ABC News(NEW YORK) — Award-winning actor James Earl Jones, 83, who takes the stage in the play You Can’t Take it With You as Grandpa Vanderhof, said it’s “wonderful” to be back on Broadway.
The comedic play, whose cast includes Rose Byrne, Kristine Nielsen, Annaleigh Ashford and Elizabeth Ashley, is about an engaged couple introducing their very different families to each other.
“It is Romeo and Juliet. … These families are equal in dignity but not in wealth,” Jones said. “The wealth has set the other family, the boy’s family, apart in a way that’s not all that healthy and Grandpa knows that because he came from that world. … He was very aggressive, making an attempt at Wall Street. Here’s a guy who I’ll say … tried then gave it up. But the other family has thrived and … the father of the groom is the epitome of the dignified American. … And he’s got this son. … And my granddaughter’s in love with him.”
He called the experience “fascinating.”
“Every member of the cast carries the play. There’s no star. It’s not on my shoulders,” Jones said. “It’s on every one of our shoulders, and they do it beautifully. They’re really some sharpshooters.”
Jones, who provided the voice of Darth Vader in the Star Wars movies, won the Voice Icon Award from the first-ever Voice Arts Awards in November.
He said Star Wars fans still come by the theater to get autographs.
“I love that they think well of it,” he said. “I’m very proud to have been a part of that. It’s a great cult growing up around the whole — good for George [Lucas] and good for everybody, including the mythologists that inspired George.”
A new Star Wars film is expected out in 2015.
As for Jones, despite all the accolades and achievements, he said he was still the same person who was born in Mississippi and raised on a Michigan farm.
He remembers his grandfather’s advice to take things one step at a time.
“Every production I do is another step. Destiny — I don’t know what that is. … Just the step is what’s important,” he said. “The journey is what’s important. I consider myself a journeyman actor. I love the phrase.”
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