Peter Mayhew

Mayhew stood seven feet three, the result of a pituitary condition connected to Marfan syndrome that was treated in his mid-teens, and he was cast in his first film, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger, essentially for that height. His second film was Star Wars.

Chewbacca is a costume with no face and no dialogue, so the performance is entirely posture and timing. Mayhew gave the character a gait, a rolling and slightly stooped walk that reads as animal and person at the same time, and a habit of turning his whole body to look at something, because the mask could not act on its own. The comic timing with Harrison Ford is his, not the sound department's. He played the part through the original trilogy, in the Holiday Special, again in Revenge of the Sith, and once more in The Force Awakens, almost four decades after the first.

He retired from the role after that film. He also voiced the character in The Clone Wars and played him in television appearances including The Muppet Show, and spent his later years as a fixture of the convention circuit, which is where most fans actually met him. He died in 2019. Very few actors get to define a character that thoroughly while never being seen doing it.