I have to start this entry by mentioning a couple of funny signs I saw recently. The first wasn’t actually funny, it just had an amusing typo. I was washing my hands in the bathroom of a Subway and saw on the door a sign with the reminder that “all employess must wash their hands before returning to work.” Now that I think about it, I’m frankly surprised that it was only written in English considering the language skills of a lot of the people who’ve worked there in the past year, but I digress.
The other sign was one I saw today in the office of one of the court coordinators. There was a mirror one of the walls and below it a sign that read, “Mirror, mirror on the wall… what the #!*% happened?”
But onto the topic of the subject. I’ve told this story to a lot of friends but I’ve never written it here and I feel there could be no day more appropriate to share it than on actor Peter Mayhew’s 64th birthday. Mayhew’s IMDB page notes that he has played such film roles as “Sherpa Guide”, “Dead Man”, “The Tall Knight”, “Giant”, and “Minoton”, and his greatest notoriety in life might have been limited to being the world’s tallest hospital orderly if not for the only prominent role on his resumé, that of the wookie Chewbacca in the Star Wars films. It was a role that brought him great fame, even though he wore a hairy suit for the entire series and never spoke any dialogue of his own (sound effects were used for Chewbacca’s noises). How our paths ended up crossing is a strange story, one that resulted in easily the most surreal event of my life.
It happened 8 years ago this month or last, near the end of my junior year of high school. I remember coming home from school and laying down on my bed to take a nap. I don’t remember if it was track season or not, but athletics was my last class of the day that trimester so I would have done a bit of running anyway before going home, so that might have been why I was tired. In any case, I hadn’t been lying down long when mom suddenly burst through the door. She obviously was trying to get my help for something, and I, being tired, wasn’t looking forward to whatever it was. Her words to me, as closely as I can remember them, were, “Quick, get up! You need to help us get the photography equipment together. We have to go take Chewbacca’s picture!”
That’s one way to get someone’s attention. Not sure of what I had just heard, I asked mom to clarify. She asked me which actor had played Chewbacca, and I answered that it was Peter Mayhew. Reminded of the name she was looking for, she debriefed me on the situation. Peter Mayhew, the world’s most famous wookie, was now living in our hometown. He apparently had a convention of some kind coming up and had a very low supply of whatever publicity photos he usually took with him to sign at these things. So he needed some pictures made quickly, and his wife (who was actually from Texas) had looked up photographers in the local phone book and found my parents’ business listed and called them.
I helped mom and dad load their van, as I often did on these jobs, and rode out to Mr. Mayhew’s house. He drove up a minute or two after we got there. He shook hands with dad (who stood a good 1′5″ shorter than him) and introduced himself in his Yorkshire English accent. We had brought a backdrop with us and we set it up in his living room. For the picture, Mrs. Mayhew had bought a t-shirt with a picture of Chewbacca on it, from Wal-Mart I think she said. It still had the tag on it so they cut it off and Peter Mayhew put on the shirt with the image of the character he portrayed. While waiting for him to be ready and the pictures to be taken, I sat down on a couch in the living room and couldn’t help but laugh at the situation I’d found myself in. I’d come home expecting to take a nap and get some rest, and less than an hour later here I was sitting on Chewbacca’s couch. How high does such an event rank on the surreal scale? I say at least 9 out of 10.
They took several pictures, the best of which ended up being the one they made several hundred or thousand copies of for Mayhew to sign for fans at conventions, and at one time he even was offering signed copies of it from his website. To this day the main picture on his IMDB page is one of the ones my parents took. You can see it below.
Afterwards we all chatted for a bit, and he gladly talked some about his Star Wars co-stars, who he still considers good friends, especially Kenny Baker (R2-D2) and Anthony Daniels (C-3PO). His walls were lined with pictures of all of them, including (I think) a few with Harrison Ford and George Lucas. He had a glass case where he stored his lifetime achievement award that he got at the 1997 MTV Movie Awards. In that same case was what appeared to be a Star Wars script opened to a random page, though I don’t know if it was a shooting script or an earlier copy. I’d seen the original Star Wars trilogy enough times to recognize most of the dialogue, but what was on that page wasn’t any dialogue I recognized, and indeed I think part of the page had an “X” marked over it, probably meaning it wasn’t something they ended up filming.
Peter Mayhew himself was a supremely nice guy. He was friendly, had a good sense of humor (he didn’t groan when dad asked him how many “wookie of the year” jokes he’d heard), and seemed quite humble. I’m sure that he’s well aware that he has made a very good living off of playing one character in four movies, although at the time I met him it had been less than a year since The Phantom Menace came out, so he was still living off of a character he’d last played 17 years earlier, and he may not have known yet that he would be playing Chewbacca again later in the prequel trilogy.
That was the only time I met him, though dad met him at least one or two other times to take him some more copies of the print. Some years later, he bought the rights to that negative from my parents (knowing mom, she probably sold it for a lot less than she could have), so unless he needs any more pictures taken in the future they likely won’t be meeting him again. But it was an interesting arrangement while it lasted, and it provided me with a good story to tell, one that is still my only notable “meeting a celebrity” story, but when that one is Chewbacca it makes it that much cooler, in my opinion anyway.
