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. Butler ditched the guitar and bedazzled tracksuits for a hairless, chiseled physique and piercing stare — a menacing figure that the film’s director, Denis Villeneuve, carefully measured.
“In the book, he’s a character with a lot of appetite. An appetite for life, power, lust and for sex,” Villeneuve tells The Envelope. But Frank Herbert’s epically imaginative sci-fi allegory wasn’t the sole source to give the character shape. “I also wanted to bring to life a psychopath. Someone who considers other people like objects and acts with absolutely no fear. And someone with one weakness — sexuality — where we would feel the vulnerability. That is something I don’t think is in the book that I brought because I wanted to create more dimension to the character.”
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 (Stellan Skarsgård), who slaughtered the family of Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) to regain control over the spice fields of the planet Arrakis.
“Would you like some fresh meat tonight, my darlings?” Feyd whispers to the servants around him, a nod to what’s to come. He runs his tongue down a newly forged blade before slashing the throat of one of his pets and stabbing another to test its sharpness. Flesh-eating servants scurry to slurp the blood spilling below. 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. “At one point, I connected with this kind of spasmodic face and animalistic expression of pleasure coming out of him that’s uncontrollable because he just killed someone. 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.”
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. A hot, black sun shines overhead, voiding everything of color — stark imagery photographed by cinematographer Greig Fraser with a camera modified to record infrared. There’s a malicious swagger to Feyd as he slices through the first two foes before being tested by a third, a moment he invites with pleasure.
In crafting the scene’s suspense, editor Joe Walker mapped out where the action and roar of the crowd would peak. “We thought the wildest excitement would be when Feyd removes his shield. And then we tried to figure out a way to have a little bit left in reserve to keep building up to the point where he finally kills Lanville [Roger Yuan].” Sound envelops the scene with a balance between the chaos of the crowd and the galvanizing score as Walker brings us closer into the fight.
“All of the Harkonnen language is made up, and Martin Kwok, who was our supervising dialogue editor, went to town with that. They shot crowds doing different chants, so it became very authentic,” says rerecording mixer Ron Bartlett. “But then we multiplied it by a couple hundred thousand people to fill that stadium,” he adds.
“The other thing, when he walks out he’s like a rock star, so we pulled the crowds back and allowed the score to really walk him out,” notes rerecording mixer Doug Hemphill.
For composer Hans Zimmer, the approach was connecting to the details of the character and scene. “Part of my process is to work closely with the cinematographer, production designer and with the actors, so I don’t write something that’s going to put the actors off their path or feel wrong for that infrared arena sequence. We were all really careful about that,” says Zimmer, who used materials from Home Depot to modify instruments used for the score.
“The sound was very important for me because it’s a cultural manifestation of the Harkonnen,” says Villeneuve. “But the crowd is also an important character because of what Feyd becomes in front of them. 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.”
For a pivotal moment where Feyd meets Lady Margot (Léa Seydoux) in a large corridor, only to coerce her into a nearby room and eventually impregnate her, the hypnotic scene was an infusion of teamwork. “It’s the closest in anything I’ve cut to blending performance, shots, sound effects and music in a unified rhythm,” notes editor Walker. “And that was always my goal, to find a very rhythmic way to make this sort of symphony play.”
In seeing the character onscreen, Villeneuve says, “There was a presence in the eyes that was frankly very frightening. When I see Austin I’m still not used to seeing him with hair. I’m still having nightmares.”
