The Butler did it!
Actor goes to great lengths to play villain
It is Feyd-rautha Harkonnen's birthday, and his uncle has the perfect gift: three drugged prisoners to pummel to death, a fun, low-stakes ego boost for a sadistic boy. Who do you cast to play this sci-fi villain, heir to the menacing Harkonnen house in Frank Herbert's intergalactic epic Dune?
David Lynch took a big swing in his maligned 1984 film with Sting, the Police frontman who played Feyd with fiery red hair and those winged leather underpants. Denis Villeneuve turned to Austin Butler.
If there were a prerequisite to taking on a character as relentless as Feyd — a singularly bloodthirsty villain in this universe of profit-seekers and prophets — it would be commitment to the bit.
In Dune: Part Two, that involves appearing bald with gnarly black teeth and no eyebrows — the trademark Harkonnen look, and one Butler manages to imbue with an unsettling sexiness. He might not be as ruthless as his uncle — the lumpy baron Vladimir Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgard), but Feyd is still a bad man. Brutality earns him higher standing in the Harkonnen clan, and Feyd maintains a dead-eyed stare — except for when he nears his kill. He betrays little humanity while slaughtering his former lovers, to say nothing of those standing in the way of his family's throne.
Butler earned an Oscar nomination for his breakout role in Elvis following a barrage of stories about the extreme measures he took to play the troubled singer. He said he didn't see his family for three years — some of which overlapped with the pandemic — and “had months where I wouldn't talk to anybody, and when I did, the only thing I was ever thinking about was Elvis.” He told GQ he was rushed to the hospital after shooting: “My body just started shutting down the day after I finished Elvis. The next day I woke up at 4 in the morning with excruciating pain.”
He noted in a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, he set a firmer boundary while playing Feyd, because allowing character to bleed into his life “would be unhealthy for my family and friends.”
“When the camera was off, you were still maybe 25 or 30 per cent Feyd,” Villeneuve said in the same interview. “Just enough to still be present and focus(ed), but removed enough that you didn't kill anybody on set.”