Playing Chewbacca Is A ‘Dream’ For This ‘Star Wars’ Actor, But It Sounds Like A Nightmare

Peter Mayhew played Han Solo’s arm-ripping sidekick Chewbacca from the original Star Wars to 2015’s The Force Awakens, where he shared the role with Joonas Suotamo due to chronic knee and back pain. It’s a mentally and physically demanding performance, as Suotamo revealed in an Instagram post where he went through the steps of becoming the seven-foot-plus Wookiee.

“Playing Chewbacca is a dream. But sometimes there were days that were more demanding than others,” he wrote. “On interior sets there might not be any real airflow and the hairs would just trap all the heat to the fur and cause a slow temperature rise. While filming I would perform my bit and we would go again many times – usually this would take from an hour to 2 hours. On scenes requiring 3 hours I would sometimes need to start conserving my energy, which unfortunately meant having to reserve some of my jokes for after filming.”