Austin Butler brings a rock star sensibility to highly anticipated Dune sequel

Standing in the centre of a stadium before thousands of his screaming subordinates, Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, the treacherous princeling of the Dune saga, is a blend of pop star grandeur, brilliance and reckless pride. In the hands of Elvis actor Austin Butler, the leap from Graceland to the desert planet of Arrakis doesn’t seem as far as you might have first imagined.

In fact, there is something about the young villain of Frank Herbert’s iconic 1965 novel that has always bound him to rock stars. Mick Jagger was to play him in Alejandro Jodorowsky’s planned (but failed) 1970s adaptation. And then, when David Lynch brought the story to the screen in 1984, in another complicated, flawed production, the role went to another pop star, Sting.

When French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve gave the role of Feyd-Rautha in Dune: Part Two to Butler, the 32-year-old actor zeroed in immediately on the character’s feline qualities. “The way that a panther would move, the power they have, to be incredibly still, and then pounce,” Butler says. “And at a certain point, a shark, how there is such a coldness to their eyes, [that] they could just rip your head off at any moment.

French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve and Austin Butler on the set of Dune: Part Two.

“Holding somebody else’s life in your hands, [you can feel] the sense of power that Feyd-Rautha feels in those moments, but also how little he values other people’s lives,” Butler says. “And spending so much time in the arena, fighting to the death, that’s inherently like a rock star, where you have an entire arena screaming for you.”

And in his own ears, what was he listening to as he prepared for the role? “I had everything from tribal music and metal music, heavy metal to classical music, operatic music on my playlist,” Butler says. “It was quite a wide-ranging playlist and each [genre] would summon a different feeling that I would listen to while I trained or just before scenes.”

Completing the pop soundscape for Butler was the film’s soundtrack by Hans Zimmer, the ubiquitous Oscar-winning master of cinema music, who has composed for everything from Gladiator and The Last Samurai to The Dark Knight trilogy, Inception and Man of Steel.

Zimmer also scored Villeneuve’s first Dune film in 2021, with one critical, creative bonus: Zimmer wrote more than 70 hours of music before he even began composing the score, just to help Villeneuve get in the right frame of mind to write the script. That’s commitment. “He’s so powerful and so incredible,” Butler says.

Timothee Chalamet and Austin Butler in Dune: Part Two.

Dune: Part Two picks up where Dune (2021) ended, with royal heir Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) taking refuge with the native Fremen of Arrakis in the wake of Baron Harkonnen’s (Stellan Skarsgård) decimation of House Atreides. The sequel focuses on Zendaya as Chani, a mysterious young Fremen woman connected to Paul’s destiny, and Butler as Feyd-Rautha, Harkonnen’s scheming nephew.

Butler comes to the role after an incredible run in a few short years, leaping from a Broadway performance in The Iceman Cometh and a small role in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood to playing Elvis Presley in Baz Luhrmann’s critically acclaimed Elvis, and Gale Cleven in the new Steven Spielberg/Tom Hanks war miniseries Masters of the Air.

His stunning performance in Elvis earned him a Golden Globe and BAFTA Award for best actor, while Masters of the Air has become 2024’s breakout streaming TV hit, chalking up audience numbers that have ranked it as Apple TV+’s most successful original series launch ever.

Up close, Butler is equal parts old-fashioned matinee idol, pin-up boy and actor of substance, which is rare. In Hollywood, you can be Chris Hemsworth or Lucas Hedges, but you’re rarely permitted to be both.

The Anaheim, California-born actor’s rise to prominence is built on shrewd collaborations – with Luhrmann on Elvis and with Spielberg and Hanks on Masters of the Air – but also, to some extent, on how the camera captures his image. It’s the difference between being an actor and a movie star. And that alchemy, unexpectedly, seems to have some uniquely Australian properties.

Butler’s performance as Presley was captured by Oscar-nominated cinematographer Mandy Walker, an Australian. In Masters of the Air, by Adam Arkapaw, another Australian. And in Dune: Part Two, Oscar-winner Greig Fraser, a third. What’s going on, I ask him. Are they glazing the lens with Vegemite?

Austin Butler at the world premiere of Dune: Part Two in London.Credit: Getty

“It just goes to show that some of the greatest cinematographers are Australians, and I’ve been fortunate enough to get to work with them,” Butler says, laughing. “Australian crews, the way they work together, it’s such a well-oiled machine. Greg had worked with Mandy, Adam knows Mandy, Mandy knows Grieg ... there’s a family element there.

“Australia feels like it’s a family,” Butler adds, saying those relationships have helped him navigate a dense and difficult body of work of which he is immensely proud. “For me, it creates a kind of through line that connects these projects. We already have a rapport, but I also feel like I am very fortunate because they’re some of the best cinematographers alive today.”

What these roles demand of an actor varies from one job to the next, Butler says. He had previously described Elvis as the most intimidating thing he’d ever done, noting that, essentially, he did not sleep for two years. But as we discuss Dune: Part Two, the investment in the role seems substantial requiring changes to his physicality and the nature of his movement. An early glimpse of 12 minutes of completed footage confirms the role is demanding.

“With Elvis, I felt such a responsibility because playing anybody who has lived, you feel a responsibility to them as a human being,” Butler says. “But then, on top of that, everybody has their own idea of who Elvis Presley is and so there’s an extra responsibility there. And then you have so much footage that you can look to.

“With Dune, it’s different. But I did feel a responsibility to the fans of the book and the fans of the film, and to cinema in general,” Butler says, acknowledging the book’s unique place in modern cultural history. “It’s not that it has to break you down but, whatever it demands, you want the passion to be there, that you will give it everything it needs. And for me, I just want to give it every ounce of my soul.”

Florence Pugh, Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya and Austin Butler, stars of Dune: Part Two.Credit: Getty

Butler first read Frank Herbert’s book when he was a teenager. “I had a friend who introduced me to the book when I was a kid, and so that was my first experience of reading it, many years ago,” he says. “So, really, it was a feeling of escaping into this other world, the escapism of entering this sci-fi world.”

At the time, he was too young to lean deeply into or properly grasp the story’s larger themes of faith, wealth inequality and scarcity of resources, as feuding royal houses battled to control a rare spice mined on the arid and brutally inhospitable world of Arrakis. Returning to it after watching Villeneuve’s first Dune film was a “re-invigoration” of his love for the book.

“I just thought that film was a masterpiece,” Butler says. “So reading it again, it hit me completely differently. I was hearing and feeling the textures [of the book] so much more, and the themes of power and the misuse of power, the warring families and the Shakespearean sense of it.”

Austin Butler and model partner Kaia Gerber at the 2023 Vanity Fair Oscar Party.Credit: Getty Images

A by-product of the modern world, the script for Dune: Part Two first arrived in Butler’s hands as an attachment to an email. “I tried different ways to do it digitally; eventually I printed it out as a script,” he says. “I can make notes in it, it’s tactile and it was helpful for me to have a script that I could hold in my hand. It feels more tangible when it’s physical.”

The journey for him as an actor to Feyd-Rautha was a far more ambiguous undertaking than it was to find Presley in Elvis. “It’s a lot more ambiguous in the beginning,” Butler says. For Elvis, there was a vast trove of historical film material, Presley’s extraordinary discography, biographies from every perspective and the first-hand recollections of Presley’s family.

For Dune: Part Two, there was just the first film, which offered tonal notes on the wider inhospitable world of Arrakis but not of Feyd-Rautha himself; Herbert’s original novel, in which the character first appeared; and the Prelude to Dune prequel trilogy, written by Herbert’s son Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson.

Austin Butler as Elvis.Credit: Warner Bros

On screen, there are only two portrayals of significance: Sting’s performance in David Lynch’s wild and wonderful 1984 adaptation and Matt Keeslar in the 2000 miniseries Frank Herbert’s Dune, which was produced for US television. The Lynch film was, by most industry methodologies, a failure, coming in the wake of Star Wars (which had its own spin on spice mining, desert planets and an oppressive empire) and a decades-long struggle to bring any adaptation to the screen.

The Jodorowsky concept – the one with its eye on Mick Jagger – would have had Orson Welles as Baron Harkonnen, Salvador Dali as Emperor Shaddam IV and Jodorowsky’s own son, Brontis, as Paul Atreides. A vision so wild it’s difficult to grasp. Jodorowsky also wanted a soundtrack by Pink Floyd, an idea so bonkers it was not until 1980 that Dino De Laurentiis asked Queen to do the same thing for his flawed masterpiece Flash Gordon.

There were, says Butler, many long conversations with Villeneuve. “I knew that he was my captain, and it’s his vision that I’m in service of, the vision of Frank Herbert and Denis. And so I go to the novel and Denis, and try to get the essence of what he’s creating,” Butler says.

“We had many, many conversations and that sort of became a skeleton, almost like you’re in the sketching phase at first, sketching the outline and then start filling things in and trying things,” Butler says. “I had to start at the beginning. How was he born? What was his childhood like? Who did he look up to? Is there brutality in his environment? How does he speak?

“From there, you start feeling the spirit coming and then the physicality of putting on weight, what that feels like, what it feels like to be heavier and to feel stronger, to feel more powerful. And then to learn to fight and to really train every day for six months and feel that I could fight with knives,” Butler says.

And when he wasn’t sure what to do? “Then I would have ideas and bring those ideas to Denis and then if he didn’t have an answer, he would say, ‘I’m going to go home and I’m going to dream on it’, and he’d go home and he’d come back and say, ‘I dreamt on it last night and this is what I think’,” Butler says, with a smile.

Dune: Part Two is in cinemas from February 29.