SilverWook said:
IIRC, they shot closeups and inserts at ILM. When Nubb talks or his face moves, it's the puppet.
Yes. The puppeteer is Mike Quinn.
Richard Bonehill wore suits for a great many background characters and was a stand-in at times. There were several extras who did the same, but I don't know of anyone else who did as many.
I think that Nien Nunb was the only character that he did that also got closeups and dialogue, so of all characters, it might be the most well-known. He was stormtroopers in both ESB and ROTJ, Snowtrooper, several Rebels, Mon Calamari officer, Ree-Yees. etc.
Great guy with fans btw. Enjoyed talking stories.
From http://starwarsinterviews1.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/richard-bonehill-interview.html?m=1
Probably my biggest claim to fame on the Star Wars films is that I was the only extra whose autograph was requested by one of the principles. When some of the ‘regular’ crew of extras were working on the film we got quite friendly with the leading actors. At that time they was a special anniversary edition of The Eagle comic. I had been doing some photo -story shoots and I appeared in a story in this anniversary edition. What I did not know was that Mark Hamill was a great Eagle collector. He recognized me in the comic and was mightily impressed! So in front of all the crew he asked me to sign his copy of the comic!! Isn’t life bizarre !!!
Another rather strange story I remember is that one day four of us stormtroopers we asked to do a stills photoshoot with Darth Vader. We were asked by the second assistant director to make a mess of it, dropping our guns, helmets etc. and try and make it last for at least three hours. This did seem very strange at the time but as it meant extra money we did our best to make fools of ourselves! We found out later that the object of the exercise was to keep Dave Prowse away from the shooting stage where the main unit was filming the scene where is helmet was removed to reveal a different actor as Darth Vader !