Timothy Hughes
The wait is finally over. After more than a year of buildup and anticipation, Star Wars: The Force Awakens opens Dec. 18. We will finally learn whether the seventh entry in the hallowed Star Wars franchise — the first with J.J. Abrams at the director’s helm — will live up to its Tauntaun-sized hype. We’ll know whether Finn and Poe Dameron are worthy heirs to Luke Skywalker and Han Solo, or Jar Jar Binks-level disasters. (Our money’s on the former.)
Like every other city in the known universe, Madison’s right in the middle of the Star Wars insanity — in more ways than you may realize. Sitting in the audience on the film’s opening day will be none other than Madison’s very own Sith Lord, Matt Sloan.
Many locals as well as YouTube Nation know Sloan, 42, as the voice of Chad Vader: Day Shift Manager, the star of the wildly popular web series that tracked the hilariously mundane adventures of Darth Vader’s younger, less successful brother. That series, co-created by Sloan and his longtime friend/collaborator/business partner Aaron Yonda, ran for four seasons beginning in 2006.
But Sloan’s vocal turn as the power-hungry manager of Empire Market opened up an unexpected door to a professional galaxy not so very far away at all — more voice work with LucasArts’ signature franchise. For the last eight years, Sloan’s been providing the voice for the Empire’s Dark Lord in commercials, videogames and animated TV shows.
When you hear Vader say “your feeble defense is irrelevant” before he casts a rebel soldier aside like a rag doll in the multiplayer videogame smash Star Wars: Battlefront, that’s Sloan’s voice you’re hearing. When l’il Lego Vader bitches about a pesky waiter ruining his timing in the big “I am your father” reveal scene in the Disney XD series Lego Star Wars: Droid Tales or menaces enemies in Disney Infinity 3.0? Yep, that’s Sloan, too.
Sitting in the basement of his east-side home — an impressive man cave replete with comfortable couches, a collection of vintage beer signs (Hamms!) and walls lined with vinyl, CDs and DVDs — Sloan reflects on his unusual career trajectory with a characteristic dose of humility and honest WTF?
“It’s so weird,” he says, running a hand through his hair. “It’s never something I aspired to, never something I practiced. We came up with the idea for Chad Vader, and we needed to find someone to do the voice. I said, ‘Well, I’ll try it,’ and I just did it, and it worked. That’s the strangest part of this — everything just happened. I never approached Lucasfilm; I never said, ‘Hey, I can do this voice, can I be in your videogames, can I be in your TV shows?’ It’s just so weird.”
That weirdness has paid some happy dividends for Sloan, a down-to-earth introvert with a serious talent for creativity and improvisation. (Sloan’s a regular fixture at Madison’s Monkey Business Institute.) Income from the Vader voice work — Sloan was doing frequent voice sessions for Lego Star Wars as well as an unannounced video game as recently as this summer — has given him the freedom to pursue his other creative passions. Specifically, a pair of YouTube shows called Welcome to the Basement and Beer and Board Games that feature Sloan and his friends riffing on movies and playing, um, board games.
“This is the type of work I’ve always wanted to do,” says Sloan. “I always said, in my 20s, post-college, ‘I wish I could do something creative.’”
Timothy Hughes
Sloan saw the first Star Wars movie as a rerelease at a drive-in with his folks when he was a child — he was just 3 years old when it came out in 1977. He admits that, like a lot of kids, Star Wars was a big part of his childhood —but interestingly, it wasn’t the movies that inspired him. It was the toys.
Children of the late ’70s and early ’80s have fond memories of the Kenner Star Wars toy line, a massive, first-of-its kind merchandising blitz that gave us everything from landspeeders and X-wing fighters to action figures of Greedo and the mail-order, pre-toy safety craze Boba Fett with the actual rocket launcher on his back.
“The movies were big, but with the toys, we could do our own thing,” Sloan says. “That could have been the start of becoming a writer and writing film scripts. Having that aid to my imagination.”
And the toys still carry an impact for him. Tucked in among his shelves at home is the Darth Vader action figure released in conjunction with Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, one of the first videogames Sloan voiced for LucasArts.
“That’s my action figure,” he says. “That’s not James Earl Jones. That’s one of the ways the weirdness of the whole situation is real to me, tangible. A lot of times it’s like, ‘Why me? Why am I doing this, why am I special?’”
A different person with a less grounded personality might have gotten swept up in the hype and the celebrity. Sloan took the opposite approach.
“I look at it as just work, and I think that’s important,” he says. ”I go in and I do my work, and when I’m done I don’t think about it. I don’t want to get a big head about it or get swept away by it. That’s not the kind of person I am.”
Sloan is pure Wisconsin, the youngest of four children born to Milwaukee factory workers. His parents weren’t around much, which left him free to immerse himself in cartoons, movies and, of course, Star Wars toys. His family had HBO, so standup comedy was a staple of his preteen mix. But while George Carlin, Richard Pryor and Bill Cosby — that’s pre-skeezy Bill Cosby, remember — were, as he puts it, “like my baseball cards,” it never occurred to him to become a standup comedian.
Then, in high school, he went to a summer camp and discovered a little something called ComedySportz, The improv bug bit hard.
“I thought, ‘I think I want to do that,’” he recalls.
It didn’t happen right away. Sloan attended St. Norbert College — he graduated in 1995 with degrees in creative writing and theater — where the Fox Cities ComedySportz troupe performed for freshman orientation, rejuicing his interest. He attended a free workshop/audition the group put on — and then didn’t hear anything back. It was another year before Mike Eserkaln, now one of the regulars on Beer and Board Games, got him in the door.
“Improv informs everything about me,” Sloan says. “My writing, the shows online, it informs everything I do.”
It also connected him with Yonda, who was part of the Madison ComedySportz troupe. When Sloan moved to Madison in 2000, they performed together in the troupe for about a year before teaming up to create comic sketches on their own. Their first effort was a sexual harassment training video that ended up playing out like an absurdist French film. (Sadly, unlike much of Sloan and Yonda’s catalogue, this one’s MIA online.) Then, in 2006, they hit on the brilliant idea of Chad Vader. The skits struck a pop-culture nerve harder than the Rebels nailed the Death Star. By 2006, Yonda and Sloan had quit their day jobs to focus on creating Chad Vader content full time. Today, they’re still producing video content together as part of Blame Society Productions.
“We have a very similar sense of humor,” says Yonda of Sloan. ”We have this sense of timing, predicting what the other person will do. We also come from the same place, have the same influences comedically.”
Looking back, it’s clear now the pair had a preternatural, Jedi-like sense of timing, having created hilarious and essential content at a time when YouTube’s Partnership Program was launching and the idea of ad revenue sharing for content creators suddenly made online broadcasting a viable career option. Yonda’s the one who pushed the idea of doing Chad Vader and the one who wore the costume during the skits and episodes. And even though Sloan’s gotten a more tangible benefit, Yonda couldn’t be happier.
“I’m proud he’s the voice of Darth Vader,” he says.
Madison’s local theater scene has given Sloan two of the key figures in his life. Six months after moving to Madison, he met his future wife and video collaborator Tona Williams in a 2001 Strollers Theatre production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. He met Craig Johnson, the co-host of Welcome to the Basement (and an Isthmus contributor) in a 2001 performance of Macbeth, in which Sloan starred as the Scottish thane.
“When I first met him, I thought what every actor thinks,” jokes Johnson. “I should have gotten that role.”
Sloan and Johnson quickly bonded over music, trading recommendations and having listening parties, including a memorable hourlong session where the pair endured Lou Reed’s deeply polarizing feedback-fest “Metal Machine Music.”
“We figured if we suffered through it, we could say we had,” recalls Johnson, who played the janitor “Weird” Jimmy on Chad Vader.
“He’s very cautious at first — he’s a good observer,” says Johnson of Sloan. “When you first meet him, he’s quiet and standoffish — but only until he’s figured you out.”
The concept for Welcome to the Basement is simple. Sloan picks out a movie that he and Johnson have never seen before, and the two of them watch it together, riffing and commenting. It has a definite Mystery Science Theater vibe, but there’s something else going on as well. “We’re channeling our friendship with this show,” says Johnson. “We’re helping other people love movies.”
Sloan doesn’t think of it as a review show. “Our personalities have informed the show and caused it to evolve,” he explains. “We don’t really have to write anything — the show just happens.”
Tonight’s selection is Back to the Future Part II, a film that, amazingly, Sloan hasn’t seen despite the fact that he’s owned the boxed trilogy for years. The two of them improvise an intro that includes Johnson encapsulating the film’s time-warping plot into an impressive 21 seconds.
As Sloan and Williams’ two beloved cats, Ernesto and Cecil, take up residence on the edges of the set, Williams adjusts the Japanese lanterns that serve as set lighting. Williams handles the technical parts of the show, while Sloan handles the creative. Williams says having defined roles is one of the reasons their 12-year marriage functions so well.
Sloan dons a down vest and Johnson puts on goggles as the film’s opening credits — and Williams’ videocamera — begin to roll.
“Ah, yes, Billy Zane and his bland handsomeness,” quips Johnson.
Sloan’s first major work for LucasArts was the PC game Star Wars: Empire at War, a real-time strategy game released in 2006. Sloan did the voice sessions, and, in an echo of his ComedySportz audition, heard nothing for almost a year.
“I thought, ‘I guess I blew it,’” he recalls. “But then they contacted me for The Force Unleashed — they said they had held auditions and they couldn’t find anybody. After that, it got pretty ripped.”
Interestingly, Lucasfilm reportedly debated whether to shut Chad Vader down, before opting to give the series an official Star Wars Fan Film award.
When he first started, he and Yonda rented DVDs of the original Star Wars trilogy, fast-forwarding to all the Vader scenes to capture the rhythm and tone of the delivery.
At one point, Sloan spent several months voicing the thousands of syllabic sounds of what was going to be a Darth Vader version of Siri. Sadly for millions of Star Wars geeks, the project never saw the light of day.
These days, he finds he doesn’t need to practice or warm up much — the role has become a part of him.
“It’s not just doing a voice; it’s giving a performance,” says Sloan. “There’s an energy and a demeanor to it. That’s the alluring part for me.”
Fans and friends don’t ask Sloan to do the voice much these days — and that’s a relief, as he’s never actually liked doing an impromptu rendition for people. “It’s embarrassing,” he admits. “My voice is processed, so people inevitably end up being like, ‘That doesn’t sound like Darth Vader.’”
It’s a common theme. Even Michael Donovan, the voice director who works with Sloan on his performances for Lego Star Wars: Droid Tales, admits he was surprised at first when he met the Midwesterner.
“His normal voice, he doesn’t sound anything like Darth Vader,” Donovan says. “I was thinking at first he’s going to be a big, black guy.”
But as it turns out, it’s Sloan’s voiceprint (the visual representation of the spectrum of frequencies of his voice) that’s perfect for the role.
“When he delivers the line and we drop it down through the processor, it falls exactly into place. I don’t know how he found this out, but it totally does. It just works.”
Sloan’s natural talent at acting and improv is as important as his voiceprint to a director like Donovan, who needs his voice actors to be efficient and versatile.
“The thing about Matt is that he gets the joke, he gets the funny,” explains Donovan, who voices Emperor Palpatine in the series and also works remotely with Anthony Daniels, the unmistakable voice of C-3PO.
Donovan conducts his voice sessions with Sloan via Skype at Paradyme Studios on West Washington Avenue. Sloan also voices other characters for the series, including Imperial Stormtroopers and aliens. “Matt really understands the process,“ says Donovan. “He always gives me some choices in how he delivers his lines.”
These days, Sloan and Yonda are still fielding plenty of video work through Blame Society Productions, including a promising (and confidential) series project through their YouTube network, Maker Studios. The project would film in Los Angeles. But don’t expect Sloan to pick up his Midwestern stakes: He doesn’t drive, and his lifestyle is too well suited for Madison. Like a lot of Star Wars Nation, he’s heard the rumors that a certain black-helmeted Sith Lord will make an appearance in one of the sequels. That could easily lead to another round of Vader voice work for him, a prospect he welcomes.
And as for that galaxy far, far away? Sloan’s had his tickets to The Force Awakens lined up for a while — he’ll be at the early matinee on Friday, Dec. 18.
“Seeing it early is a big deal because I know Facebook will spoil every second of it the day it’s released,” Sloan says. “I also want to be able to talk about it on the show as soon as possible.”
Editor's note: Original version of this article called Lucasfilm "LucasFilms". This has been corrected.
