Mufasa star Aaron Pierre on following in the legendary Lion King footsteps of James Earl Jones

Aaron Pierre has opened up about the ‘fears’ he had when he signed on for the title role in the Disney prequel.

Voice acting challenges don’t come much harder than the one that faced UK actor Aaron Pierre when he signed on the Mufasa: The Lion King.

In taking the title role, not only would the classically trained star of movies including M. Night Shyamalan’s Old and the Australia-shot Foe have to expand his skill set by singing the songs of a modern Broadway great, he was also going have to follow in the footsteps of arguably the finest voice in the history of cinema.

In the 1994 Oscar-winning animated original Lion King and the 2019 photo-realistically animated remake, the regal, doomed Mufasa was voiced by none other than James Earl Jones, whose deep bass rumble and flawless diction had also terrified generations of moviegoers as Darth Vader in the Star Wars Universe.

After nearly 70 years acting on stage and screen, Jones died in September at the age of 93 and even before that, Pierre admits that his legacy weighed heavily on him when he stepped into the recording booth to play a younger version in the eagerly anticipated prequel film that tells the story of how Mufasa and Scar (voiced by Jeremy Irons in the original) went from being brothers to mortal enemies.

Kelvin Harrison Jr. and Aaron Pierre. who voice Taka and Mufasa in the Lion King prequel. Picture: Frank Ishman

“I’m totally in alignment with you – I think it is cinema’s greatest voice and I was nervous,” says Pierre over Zoom call from Los Angeles, alongside co-stars Kelvin Harrison (who voices the young Scar) and Tiffany Boone (who voices Mufasa’s future wife and Simba’s mother Sarabi).

“I certainly had fears because, yes, within the context of The Lion King James Earl Jones is an enormous inspiration to me, but even outside of the context of that he’s always been an enormous inspiration to me as an artist.

“His artistry in its entirety is in my view unmatched and is the top of the mountain. Way before I knew I would be part of this wonderful family telling this story and way before I even became a professional and I would always be drawing inspiration and studying the great James Earl Jones. He’s phenomenal.”

Mufasa director Barry Jenkins, whose 2017 movie Moonlight won the Best Picture Oscar, says he also felt compelled to honour Jones by belatedly including a tribute to him at the beginning of the film he’d been working on for the past five years.

“We wouldn’t be here talking about this film without his performance in that 1994 production,” Jenkins says in a separate interview. “We just wouldn’t. His legacy looms quite large in this story format.

“The movie is literally called Mufasa: The Lion King and every time you watch this film and you hear Aaron’s voice you’re wondering ‘how does that voice become the voice of Mufasa?’.

“I grew up without a father and so to me in a certain way you watch these movies and these people who are larger than life, they kind of become like a surrogate father in a certain way and just felt like anybody who walked into the cinema was going to be wondering, ‘where is my dad?’ to a certain degree.”

The late James Earl Jones left big shoes to fill for Mufasa. Picture: Getty Images

Jenkins says he listened to a lot of voices while casting the main role before settling on Pierre, who he’d directed on his 2021 Emmy-nominated historical slavery drama, The Underground Railroad. Seeing how nervous Pierre was, Jenkins impressed on him that the Mufasa of this film set years before the adventures of Simba, was very different to the “perfect king and the perfect father” who is betrayed and killed by his brother in the original.

Rather than trying “to become the voice of James Earl Jones”, he told Pierre to focus on the experiences that shaped Mufusa, in this case being separated from his birth parents, adopted by a pride that treats him as an outsider and forced to stand up to danger to protect his adopted family.

“We recorded the dialogue for the film many, many ways, over the course of the last three and a half years, and there were moments when you could see him start to really relax and settle into who the Mufasa in this film is versus having in the back of his head who the Mufasa in that film was,” Jenkins says. “It was really important because it was the only way to get a very truthful depiction of who Mufasa was as a young person.”

Pierre’s other big challenge as Mufasa was his lack of musical experience. Whereas the 2019 remake mostly reworked the songs of the 1994 original written by Tim Rice and Elton John, the prequel features all new tunes by Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda. Once again, Pierre was somewhat daunted, even with the composer dialling in via Zoom to help get him through it.

Mufasa (voiced by Aaron Pierre) in Mufasa: The Lion King

“Lin-Manuel Miranda is just a phenomenal artist and also a very beautiful human being and a good friend of mine,” says Pierre. “I never imagined that Disney would give me a call and ask me to sing a couple of Disney songs for them. I really only ever sang within the context and the safety of my shower prior to that.

“So to be entrusted with that responsibility was a really wonderful thing and Lin-Manuel Miranda and his team, I have to celebrate them and give them their flowers because without them, I wouldn’t have been able to serve the beautiful songs the he wrote for the film.”

Jenkins also already knew Miranda after nearly casting him in The Underground Railroad and with no experience in the musical world, was grateful for his input and expertise as one of the most successful and original songwriters of his generation.

“He’s made some of the most some of the most persistent earworms of anybody over the last 10 to 15 years, from Encanto and Moana and of course Hamilton and so many other great things,” says Jenkins. “So he knows musicals and I don’t and I think it’s really important to acknowledge where your experience ends and where one of your collaborators, not just begins, but is just rampant.

“What I loved about working with Lin is when he came onto the project he was very clear about ‘my job, as the songwriter is to service the story and these songs should not be a distraction from the film’.”

Barry Jenkins and Lulu Wang at the world premiere of Disney's Mufasa: The Lion King in Hollywood this month. Picture: Getty Images

Best known for his smaller, grittier movies grounded in reality such as Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk, Mufasa is a massive leap for Jenkins in just about every way. Not only is it an extravagantly budgeted musical based on an existing franchise, it’s also entirely virtually created using astonishing technology to bring to life a range of African landscapes – from raging rivers to snow-blanketed mountains – as well as the realistic-looking, talking animals.

Nonetheless, after being a little surprised at being approached by Disney, he says he approached the movie as he had done any of his earlier projects by zeroing in on the characters and the more he scrutinised the story the more he realised how much it resonated with his own creative and personal life.

“I could describe what the character in Moonlight goes through and then I could describe what the main character in Mufasa will go through and at a certain point you might not understand which film I am a talking about,” he says.

“For example very early in this film our young character goes through a very intense, almost biblical event through water with their parent figure. And it shapes them and sends them out into to the rest of their life. I could be talking about Moonlight or Mufasa.

“And so it was great to know that a studio would come to me because of that – this is a guy who deals with characters and really goes deep in those interpersonal connections.”

Mufasa: The Lion King is in cinemas now.

Originally published as Mufasa star Aaron Pierre on following in the legendary Lion King footsteps of James Earl Jones