While we were busy at Collectormania this past weekend, covering the show and bringing you an episode of Making Tracks where we caught up with Yoda and Jabba the Hutt puppeteer Dave Barclay, our good friend Bryan Young interviewed legendary voice actor Jim Cummings about the Weequay rapscallion Hondo Ohnaka and the possibility of portraying the character in the live action realm, an opportunity he would be very open to.
“Probably, yes and yes, but they haven’t talked to me about it. I don’t know why, I mean… yeah. I’m there. I ain’t goin’ nowhere.”
Going further, he described working with director Dave Filoni.
“Oh yeah, that’s for sure. Yeah, he’s a great, great guy and he’s a fantastic director too, and by that I mean he kept all my ad-libs. No, but he was great. It was just a lot of fun. And you know, he lets it be organic. He lets us go for pages at a time… And he’d let us go for four or five pages at a time, so you really got the flow… and I think it shows in the performances.”
Of course, as we all know, Hondo is quite the character and Cumings spotted that on the page right away.
“I saw Hondo, and he just had a certain something about him that… he looked really cool… And they said that they wanted him to have an accent… See, everybody in the Star Wars universe up to that point, with the exception of Jar Jar Binks, and nobody knows what that accent is… It’s slightly Jamaican. So [I went] ‘Okay, well, I’m gonna do an accent where nobody knows where the hell this guy’s from…’ And just off the top of your head, does anybody where Hondo is from? Like if he was French, or Russian, or Irish, or… any guesses as to who that is?”
To hear our episode at Collectormania with Dave Barclay, listen below.
