The following are excerpts regarding Scar, Andreas Deja and Jeremy Irons, that were taken from this article found here. Go here for the full article.
	Academy Award-winner Jeremy Irons is a sure bet to join Disney's gallery of classic villains with his deliciously nasty delivery as Scar, the tyrannical uncle who is "prepared" to do whatever it takes to gain control of the Pride Lands.
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	Jeremy Irons makes his screen singing debut on "Be Prepared," as the villainous Scar bares his teeth and ambitions to an army of hideous hyenas. With just the right balance of menace and humor, the song itself grows bigger and bigger as Scar gets carried away with himself and his own oratory. Producer Hahn sees it as "a classic villain's song where Scar gets to twirl his moustache and hatch his plot. It launches into a kind of bacchanal, conga-line moment where the audience discovers what his real motivation is."
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	Working primarily with four-legged animals also proved challenging to the animators in terms of gesturing and attitudes. According to Andreas Deja, Scar's supervising animator, "When I first began to animate this character, I remember thinking, 'How am I going to get all this humanized personality into this character without hands. Hands are so important to expressing a character's emotions. Finally, I learned to concentrate on the overall body attitude -- the angle of the head and the facial expressions. Sometimes, very subtle things like raising an eyebrow let you show what the character is thinking. You have fewer things to work with but I think it can be as powerful in the end if you really understand the scene and get the acting right."
	In the case of Scar, Deja used the character's walk to express personality. "His walk is totally different from the other lions. He's usually lower to the ground because he's sneakier. He has more of a gliding walk, kind of slick and elegant, while the others are much more powerful and heavy."
	The primary inspiration for Deja's performance and Scar's ultimate design came directly from actor Jeremy Irons. "As a voice talent and actor, he was able to do so much with the dialogue and was a great springboard for the character," recalls Deja. "He had a way of playing with the words and twisting them so that they would come out very sarcastic and always a bit unexpected. I would watch him at the recording sessions and then run back to my desk because I couldn't wait to get started with the animation."
	Director Roger Allers adds, "Jeremy's recording sessions produced an embarrassment of riches. He would give us so many different interpretations that it became difficult for us to pick which was the best. He is a craftsman with his voice and was able to give all kinds of inflection and nuance. He brings to the character an air of incredible intelligence, yet sort of twisted and dark. He was absolutely brilliant."
	"People sometimes ask, 'don't you get bored doing all those drawings?' and the thing of it is that we don't think about drawing, we think about acting," continues Deja. "My job is to figure out who this character is and what he's going through emotionally at any given point. You have to know what his likes and dislikes are and how he feels about himself and the other characters. Jeremy does the voice, but the performance and how he would move and act is really up to me. I have to come up with that performance that you see up there on the screen."
	Some of Iron's physical traits also had an influence on Deja's design for the character. "There was a darkness around his eyes that fascinated me and gave him an eerie look in his films. I wanted to keep that quality so I gave Scar dark circles around his eyes and combed his mane as if it were slicked back."
	For Deja, this is the third Disney villain in a row that he has supervised having previously overseen the animation and design of Gaston in "Beauty and the Beast" and Jafar in "Aladdin." His reputation as Disney's newest "villain-meister" is well deserved.
	You don't really turn down the part of a villain whether you're an actor or an animator," explains Deja, "because they're very juicy. Villains tend to be really expressive and usually motivate the story. They're also a lot more challenging from an animation standpoint. In the case of Scar, he is probably the most evil of all the villains I have worked with. He enjoys playing with his victims and there are many different levels to his personality."
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	JEREMY IRONS (Scar) brings his Academy Award-winning talents to the role of Simba's unctuous uncle, the jealous and treacherous Scar. This is the acclaimed actor's first experience with doing a voice for an animated film.
	"It's very liberating to play an animated character," observes Irons. "It doesn't matter what messages my face sends during the recording since it's not being done to camera. This allows me to really go to extremes and play wildly with the glee and Machiavellian quality and deceit of the character. I try to put as much color as I can into just one thing -- my voice. Hopefully this gives the animators the inspiration they need to draw the character.
	"Scar is the first out and out villain that I've ever played," says the actor. "He's the baddie and a very hammy one at that. I think we all like a good villain who's sort of witty and slimy and seductive. He has many layers and lots of tricks. He's not unlike Iago in 'Othello' in that he's a very charming villain although structurally he's much more like Claudius in 'Hamlet.'
	"When I first saw what Andreas had done with the animation of Scar, I was very, very thrilled," continues Irons. "I felt that he had caught all the wickedness and humor and I was amazed how well he had understood and enlarged upon the sounds that I made when I recorded it. He really created the most extraordinary character and it helped me to feel the character better than I had before."
	"The Lion King" marks another first for the actor. It's the first film in which he is called upon to sing. "I started in London in 'Godspell,' where I sang a song called 'Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord.' In this film, I sing 'Be Prepared.' Preparing always seems to come into it. I'm ever preparing."
	Irons confesses that he is a longtime fan of Disney animation and that his favorite classic of them all is "One Hundred and One Dalmatians." "I think Cruella De Vil is one of the greatest nasties in film," he says. "I'd like to think that if Scar ever met Cruella, that they'd really make a good match."
	Born on the Isle of Wight, Irons is a classically-trained actor who first came to prominence in the acclaimed 1981 British television adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's "Brideshead Revisited." He had previously trained at the Sherbourne School before making his stage debut in 1971 in "Hay Fever" at the Bristol Old Vic Company where he remained a company member for three years. In 1973, he made his London stage debut as John the Baptist in "Godspell." This led to additional roles with The Young Vic, The New Shakespeare Company and the Royal Shakespeare Company. He made his television bow in 1975 playing Franz Liszt in the BBC mini-series, "Notorious Woman," which also aired on PBS' "Masterpiece Theater."
	In the area of motion pictures, Irons was first seen in Herb Ross' 1980 biopic, "Nijinski," where he appeared as choreographer Mikhail Fokine. This was followed by a memorable role in "The French Lieutenant's Woman" which earned him a British Academy Award nomination for his role as the man who became obsessed with Meryl Streep. His dual role as deranged twin brother protagonists in David Cronenberg's 1988 thriller, "Dead Ringers," earned him a Best Actor Award from The Film Critics Circle while his riveting screen portrayal of Claus von Bulow in Barbet Schroeder's "Reversal of Fortune" (1990) gained him further acclaim from critics and the Motion Picture Academy, which awarded him the Oscar for Best Performance by an Actor. His other distinguished film credits include: "Betrayal," "Moonlighting," "The Wild Duck," "Swann in Love," "The Mission," "Kafka," "Waterland," "Damage," "M. Butterfly" and the recent release, "The House of the Spirits."
	Other stage credits include "Much Ado About Nothing," "The Taming of the Shrew," "Wild Oats" and "The Rear Column," among others. In 1984, he made his Broadway debut in Tom Stoppard's "The Real Thing," for which he won both the Drama League Award and a Tony Award. He returned to the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1986 to appear in "The Winter's Tale," "Richard II" and "The Rover" and again in 1987 to repeat his roles in the latter two plays.
	In addition to playing Charles Rider in the television classic, "Brideshead Revisited," his TV roles include "The Captain's Doll," "The Dream" and "Tales From Hollywood," all for the BBC.
	Irons and his wife, actress Sinead Cusack, have two sons.
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