Well, laugh it up, fuzzballs — because the actor who played Porkins, William Hootkins, had a more interesting life than any of us.

Hootkins got his first taste of showbiz in school plays at St Mark’s in Dallas County, Texas. He realised early on that he was destined for supporting parts, because one of his classmates was better looking than him and snagged all the lead roles.

That classmate? Tommy Lee Jones.

Robert Hoffman, the co-founder of National Lampoon, went to St Mark’s at the same time as Hootkins and Jones, and musicians Steve Miller and Boz Scaggs were just a few years ahead of them.

But they weren’t the only people of note at St Mark’s. In the summer of '63, Hootkins was the only student to enroll for a Russian class taught by a Mrs Ruth Paine at the school.

Ruth had recently split with her husband, Michael, and had invited her friend, Marina, to stay with her. Marina and her husband, Lee, were living apart at the time, although Lee would often stay at the Paine house on weekends. Ruth even helped Lee find a job at the Texas School Book Depository.

It was an arrangement that seemed to work out for everyone — until it turned out Lee had been using the Paine garage to store the 6.5mm calibre Carcano rifle that he would allegedly use to assassinate US President John F Kennedy from the sixth-floor, southeast corner window of the Book Depository.

As the sole student of Ruth Paine’s Russian class at St Mark’s, Hootkins was interviewed by the FBI about the assassination, but it was eventually determined that Ruth and Marina didn’t know what Lee was planning, and they were in the clear.

Lee Harvey Oswald, of course, was killed by Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby on live television just two days after JFK’s death, pouring gasoline on an inferno of conspiracy theories.

After all that excitement, Hootkins went to Princeton to study astrophysics, before transferring to Oriental studies. That’s when a friend of his, aware that Hootkins’ true passion lie in acting, suggested he should move to London to study at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.

That friend, by the way, was John Lithgow.

Hootkins ended up taking Lithgow’s advice. Not only did he study in London, but he ended up living there for most of his life, playing host to the likes of Marlon Brando and Martin and Charlie Sheen at his home in Pimlico.

Star Wars was Hootkins’ third film role, after bit parts in Big Zapper and Twilight’s Last Gleaming, and he almost wasn’t in it at all.

He had initially been offered the role of the human precursor to Jabba the Hutt in a scene with Harrison Ford (you know, the one that ended up being re-inserted with a digital Jabba into the Special Edition), but — as he told Star Wars Insider in 1997 — he “took one look at the script and decided this was going to be the biggest disaster in the history of filmmaking”.

He passed, and took on a different job altogether. But when that job wrapped, Star Wars was still shooting and still in need of Rebel pilots — and Hootkins, apparently no longer worried about appearing in the biggest disaster in the history of filmmaking, decided to get on board.

When Hootkins saw his character’s name, however, he had the same reaction as everybody else.

“I saw the word ‘Porkins’. I thought, because I was a heavy guy, what’s this word, ‘Porkins’?” he told Insider.

“I saw all the amazing creature effects they were doing and I thought, wait a minute, if they are giving me a name like Porkins, is somebody going to come over and stick ears and a snout on my face?”

The ears and snout turned out to be unnecessary, and the distinctly human Hootkins got into the cockpit of the X-Wing — the only one on set, which means each member of Red Squadron was actually sitting in the same cockpit — to take his turn being filmed in it.

His pilot’s uniform didn’t fit him, and had to be slit open down the back to maintain the illusion that it did. Hootkins also worried that the t-shirt he was wearing underneath — featuring the Keep On Truckin' artwork of cartoonist Robert Crumb — would be exposed, but luckily, he was able to hold it together.

Hootkins did eventually admit that Lucas was on to something. When he saw the film for the first time at the cast and crew screening, he realised he “had been touched by genius, but had just been too dumb to know it.”

The same year he played Porkins, Hootkins also appeared as disgraced entertainer Fatty Arbuckle in director Ken Russell’s Valentino.

If someone was trying to tell him something with these character names, he didn’t take it as an insult — Hootkins relished the role, and was even working on a script of his own about Arbuckle’s fall from grace at the time of his death.

After Star Wars, Hootkins continued to pop up in small roles in virtually every beloved, geek-friendly franchise.

Whenever a major production came to England, Hootkins seemed to be there. You’ll find him as Munson, Dr Zarkov’s assistant, in Mike Hodges’ 1980 cult classic Flash Gordon.

In ’81, he returned to the Lucasfilm stable for an appearance in Raiders of the Lost Ark. He played Major Eaton, one of the two Army Intelligence agents who tell Indy that the Nazis are looking for his mentor, Abner Ravenwood.

This was actually Hootkins’ third appearance in a Harrison Ford film — they were also in 1979’s Hanover Street, a poorly received wartime romance.

In ’87, there he was as nuclear strategist Harry Howler in Superman IV: The Quest For Peace, sharing the screen with Gene Hackman and Jim Broadbent in a short but memorable scene.

In '89, Hootkins landed the other role geeks remember him for — corrupt Lieutenant Eckhardt in Tim Burton’s Batman.