A Wookiee replacing a legend
Finn follows in Peter Mayhew’s furry footsteps
Ttoo much “Star Wars.” A new “Star Wars” movie five months after the previous “Star Wars” movie — whether it’s “Solo: A Star Wars Story” or “Kenobi: A Star Wars Story” or “Star Wars: The New Jedi After the Last Jedi” — is too much “Star Wars.” I say that as a lifelong, 40-plus-years true believer. Anticipation is as much a part of “Star Wars” as Stormtroopers.
Memo to Lucasfilm: Make “Star Wars” a holiday event, a seasonal treat, an annual happening, out of your life long enough to allow us to miss it.
With one exception. There’s never enough Chewbacca.
He is the series’ most dependable source of warmth, the shambling, impenetrable, unintelligible leading man who never was — decades before Vin Diesel’s Groot came along.
Chewbacca is the co-star of seven of the (so far) 10 “Star Wars” movies made since 1977. He is the furry co-pilot of the Millennium Falcon, the right-hand Wookiee to Han Solo.
He is also a sight gag, a one-note, one-sound question mark and/or sidekick, a mime of a figure whose lineage stretches from Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp character to the Road Runner, Harpo Marx and Groot, the floral Guardian of the Galaxy.
Chewbacca is companionship incarnate, he is friendship with few grunts of disapproval, muscle in a fight, yet sensitive enough to provide comfort. Which means, across the galaxy as on
Earth, he is susceptible to being a doormat. Or as Princess Leia put it, “a walking carpet.”
Typically, Chewie is denied agency. He is as infantilized as domestic pets. Indeed, George Lucas created the character with his dog in mind, a 130-pound Alaskan Malamute named Indiana who rode shotgun in his car. There’s a sequence in “Solo” where Han and Chewie rob a train at high snowy altitudes and Chewie dons a pair of aviator goggles. My first thought: Chewie thinks he’s people!
Which is not cool.
But here’s the thing: Chewie is people.
He’s Finnish actor Joonas Suotamo, who adopted the role a few years ago from the original Chewie, Peter Mayhew, now 74. Actually, Suotamo, who is 31 and calls himself “New Bacca,” is closer to two people. He is 7 feet tall (a relative Jawa compared with 7-foot-3inch Mayhew), and leadingman handsome, with sandy blond ’70s-era Redford-like hair and easygoing charm.
He attended Penn State on a basketball scholarship, figured on an NBA career, but “injury after injury meant it wouldn’t happen.”
He also planned on studying acting there; he had played a news reporter in a high school theater production in Finland and discovered a knack for comic timing and holding an audience. But he said the theater department at Penn State told him that he was too tall to fit reasonably into a typical cast.
“Which I knew,” he said, “but I hate the stereotypes of being tall. I see myself as a normal guy. Until I see myself in photos, then, ‘Oh, I’m tall.’ Actors are often short. It can be hard to make others look good if you are three heads taller.”
So he returned to Finland and began selling insurance.
Until a basketball coach heard about a European film production looking for a tall actor with blue eyes to take a mysterious role. He thought of Suotamo, who had long held an appreciation and close attention to the movements of athletes and actors; while passing time on the road with teams, he had been an uncanny mimic of fellow players.
As it turns out, the movie was “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” and director
J.J. Abrams needed a new Chewbacca to fill in for an aging Chewbacca; three years earlier, Mayhew had gone through double knee replacement surgery.
Abrams also needed the right blue eyes for continuity. (“J.J. had used contacts on ‘Star Trek’ and hated it,” Suotamo said.)
Suotamo soon found himself in an intensive “Wookiee boot camp.” Yoga teachers and performance instructors found muscles he didn’t know he had. But the core of training was visiting Mayhew at his home in England and watching movie clips.
Suotamo learned he had a long neck, and would have to dip inside the mask to capture how Mayhew’s Chewie carried a quizzical, bashful air, tucking his chin down and sideways to his chest. “What Peter started was holy to me, and I was scared of breaking form,” he said. “He had the blueprint, and what you might call disabilities. He had grown up with gigantism, but just made that (posture) part of Chewbacca.”
Mayhew was my Chewie. He was an orderly at
King’s College Hospital in England when he first wore the mask. But he was no actor, and though it had charms, his performance was closer to a stuffed animal in a corner than a beast of action. Suotamo removes that old shuffle, and lends a loping simian gait and fresh physicality that adds more variety and expression.
“The goal was to add something new while honoring Peter,” he said. “I went into ‘Solo’ in particular wanting to see the stories about Chewbacca you only heard. Like, he’ll rip your arms off. It’s good we never see it, but you want to show the strength that lives up to that hype. Chewbacca pays lots of attention but acts like an animal, and I wanted to suggest that, a kind of clumsy, ungraceful power. You never want to become a man in a suit.”