Philpott in the Jabba costume

“As the left hand I got to eat frogs, hit people, smoke a hookah.”

It’s fair to say that this is probably not how most librarians describe their previous jobs. But Toby Philpott, who works at the Cardiff Central Library, has a past — a slimy, seedy, intergalactic past at that.

For Philpott used to be a puppeteer, one of four people needed to operate the puppet version of Jabba the Hutt. Along with David Alan Barclay, Mike Edmonds, and John Coppinger (who was outside the puppet, working the eyes), Philpott controlled Jabba’s dastardly crime lord movements in Return of the Jedi.

Philpott got the job as Jabba’s left hand while he was working for Jim Henson’s Creature Shop in Hampstead, London, in the ‘80s, as he recounted in a recent article in the South Wales Evening Post. He, Barclay, and Edmonds had to be as a perfect team under the Jabba suit, and in fact, he says they spent so much of the filming time concealed that other actors often wouldn’t recognize them during breaks.

“The challenge,” he says, “was working together so Jabba looked like one sentient creature, and not four guys in a tent… So we’d get George Lucas to address Jabba rather than us individually which did freak him out a bit at first.”

Philpott, who began as a juggler, acrobat, mime, and all around street performer, would go on to work on Labyrinth, Little Shop of Horrors (where he operated the righthand leaf of the carnivorous plant), and Who Framed Roger Rabbit. But CGI began to take the place of human puppeteers and animatronics in the ‘90s, and Philpott eventually took a job at the Cardiff Library to make ends meet.

He now teaches computer skills at the library and seems entirely sanguine about the transition: “Many people ask me why I started working here and all I can say is why not? Finding Jabba the Hutt working in a library is no more unusual than most of my life has been.”