Chewbacca is a Wookiee male from Kashyyyk, 2.28 metres tall, co-pilot of the Millennium Falcon and the longest continuously serving member of the saga's central crew. He was introduced in Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope (1977), performed by Peter Mayhew, later by Joonas Suotamo. The StarWars.com Databank describes him as "Known for his short temper and accuracy with a bowcaster" while possessing "a big heart and unwavering loyalty to his friends."
The oldest partnership in the saga
Canon dates the friendship with Han Solo to Mimban, where Han — then an Imperial infantryman — escaped captivity alongside him. Chewie stayed after the Kessel run rather than return to his tribe. Every subsequent film assumes that choice without restating it, which is why the partnership reads as bedrock rather than backstory.
A performance with no dialogue
He has never spoken a translated line on screen. Everything the audience knows about his temper, his loyalty, his grief at Han's death, arrives through posture, timing and Ben Burtt's sound design. This encyclopedia carries no quotes for him for exactly that reason: there is no verbatim line to cite, and inventing one would be worse than the blank.
What the Wookiee is for
Structurally he is the saga's conscience by proximity. He is the one who stays. In A New Hope he is the reason Han comes back; in The Empire Strikes Back he is the one trying to rebuild C-3PO in a cell nobody expects to leave; in The Force Awakens he is the witness to the death that ends the original trilogy's family, and the film gives his howl more weight than any dialogue in the scene.
Legends killed him; canon did not
This is the single largest divergence between the two continuities for any original-trilogy character. In Legends, R. A. Salvatore's Vector Prime (1999) opened the New Jedi Order by killing Chewbacca on Sernpidous — a deliberate, controversial statement that the new war would cost real people. In canon he is alive at the end of The Rise of Skywalker, receives Leia's medal in the closing minutes, and the death simply never happened.
The comics
He is present from the first issue of Marvel's original 1977 run, through the newspaper strip, and again across the 2015 Marvel Star Wars. Writing him is a known trap — a Wookiee whose every line is a growl requires the artist to carry the acting, and the runs that work are the ones that let him be silent.
Where to start
The Empire Strikes Back novelisation gives him more interior weather than the film can, and Legends readers should treat Vector Prime as the fork in the road rather than as the ending.
