Joonas Suotamo

Halfway through Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018), two prisoners are thrown into the mud on Mimban and set on each other. One of them is Han Solo. The other is a great deal of wet fur, and the thing to watch is not the fight but the moment it stops: the shift in the shoulders when the Wookiee decides the boy is not worth killing and might be worth keeping. That is Joonas Suotamo, and it is the clearest account of what he does. The face is a mask; the acting is in the weight.

He came to the part sideways. A former professional basketball player, he was hired as Peter Mayhew's body double on The Force Awakens (2015), took the role over fully for The Last Jedi (2017), and carried it through Solo and The Rise of Skywalker (2019), with Mayhew consulting along the way. Since then he has stayed inside the suit and changed the suit: Lurch in Wednesday (2022), The Scourge in Willow (2022), and Kelnacca, a Wookiee Jedi, in The Acolyte (2024), his first Star Wars part that is not Chewbacca. It is a specialised trade, and not many people are asked to practise it for a living.

What works is the walk. Suotamo has said he studied Mayhew's gait and mannerisms and would only ever play the character by honouring them, and it shows: the heavy roll through the shoulders, the pace that never quite hurries, the head that turns before the body does. His stated aim is to move like a creature rather than a tall man in a costume, and in Solo he manages it even in the action, where a stuntman's instincts would give the game away. The roars are his too, and he treats them as lines, so that a growl carries a complaint or a warning rather than filling a gap in the soundtrack.

Our reservation is the one anyone must have about a performer nobody can see. We scored Solo 58, and most of what is wrong with it, the murk, the second hour in which Han does not change, is not his doing; but we can only judge what the suit lets through, and the suit lets through less than a face. Still, we were surprised to find the Mimban scene the one that moved us in a film built largely of homework. Two prisoners who stop fighting because they realise they want the same thing is an old idea, and Suotamo sells it without a word we can understand.

He promised of Solo that "You’re going to see a side of him that’s less cuddly and more let’s-get-this-stuff-done", and that is what we got. Whether there is a career for him outside the fur is not yet clear, and possibly not the point. The best suit performers are the ones you never think about, and by that measure he is doing rather well.