Nute Gunray is the Neimoidian Viceroy of the Trade Federation, played by Silas Carson across all three prequel films. He blockades and then occupies Padmé Amidala's Naboo in The Phantom Menace (1999), sits on the Separatist Council through Attack of the Clones (2002), and is the first of that council killed by Anakin Skywalker on Mustafar in Revenge of the Sith (2005).
The character is a corporate title
Almost everything Gunray does follows from what he is: a senior officer of a commercial cartel with a private army, a Senate seat and no sovereign territory. He is not a general and never pretends to be. He takes Naboo because Darth Sidious tells him the legal exposure is covered, and he spends the rest of the film discovering how thin that assurance was.
Fear as a running gag with a point
Gunray is afraid in every scene he is in — of the Jedi, of the Queen, of Sidious, of Dooku, of Grievous. The prequels use him to make a simple argument about the war: the Separatist leadership are not fanatics, they are frightened businessmen who have been handed an army and are being steered by someone whose actual goals they never learn.
The Naboo grudge
Attack of the Clones gives him the one personal motive he has. He joins Dooku's Confederacy on the explicit condition that Amidala be killed — the humiliation of the Naboo occupation and his subsequent trials are the only thing in his life that outranks his balance sheet.
Mustafar
His death is the hinge of Revenge of the Sith. Sidious sends the newly christened Darth Vader to a room containing the Council he assembled, and has him kill every one of them. Gunray dies begging. The scene works because the audience has watched him be terrified for three films and has never once seen the terror be unjustified.
Silas Carson
Carson plays Gunray in full prosthetics with the voice dubbed in post — he also plays Ki-Adi-Mundi, Lott Dod and the Republic cruiser pilot Antidar Williams in the same trilogy, which is its own small piece of production trivia.
Continuity
Canon, and materially unchanged from Legends: the films are the source in both branches. The Legends material added a great deal of Neimoidian cultural background — hive-grub upbringing, grub-hoarding, the Trade Federation's internal politics — that current canon has not restated.
