How a villain came to life in ‘Dune: Part Two’

Perhaps no single character made a bigger impact onscreen in “Dune: Part Two” than the viciously terrifying Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, indelibly embodied by Austin Butler, who just two years ago was shaking his hips as Elvis Presley. That is something I don’t think is in the book that I brought because I wanted to create more dimension to the character.” Butler, Villeneuve and Dave Bautista on the set of “Dune: Part Two” Our first introduction to Feyd-Rautha is on his home planet of Giedi Prime as he prepares to fight the last “three specimens of House Atreides,” a special gift on his birthday from his uncle, Baron Harkonnen, who slaughtered the family of Paul Atreides to regain control over the spice fields of the planet Arrakis. It’s a display of absolute diabolical pleasure from Feyd, part of a performance Butler found early on, which, Villeneuve notes, included re-creating Skarsgård’s accent for Baron as a “way to step into the Harkonnen family” and “create a feeling of familiarity to Baron, who is his mentor figure.” “As we were going through the makeup tests, Austin was tremendously playful, willing to try things,” Villeneuve says. We played with that kind of deviant behavior because it’s not easy to connect with a character that is so far away from us.” Austin Butler’s Feyd-Rautha is magnetic on the screen in “Dune: Part Two.” When Feyd steps into an enormous arena filled with a chanting mob eager for bloodshed, a brutalist symphony of visual aesthetics and aural tonality deepens the viciousness of the character. It’s the birth of the idea that he could be a leader.” Developing Feyd’s weakness for women, Villeneuve credits Butler’s ability to “glide from aggressive and threatening behavior to vulnerability in a very few seconds.. That was something that I was really impressed by, so I need to give a lot of credit to the actor here who gave me those nuances that I was wishing for on the screen.” A scene between Austin Butler and Lea Seydoux was “the closest in anything I’ve cut to blending performance, shots, sound effects and music in a unified rhythm,” notes editor Joe Walker.