Dune star David Dastmalchian (Piter De Vries) describes his character’s “sick curiosity”

Director Denis Villeneuve (Blade Runner 2049) is adapting Frank Herbert’s Dune for the big screen…well, the first half of the first book, anyway. Naturally, Hollywood is hoping it will turn into a mega-franchise, but we can figure out that part when the first movie hits theaters in 2020. Until then, there’s plenty of time for the stellar cast to talk about the iconic characters they’re playing. For instance, actor David Dastmalchian (Ant-Man) recently spoke with CBR about his role as Piter De Vries.

Piter De Vries is a powerful Mentat in service to the evil Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård). Mentats are human computers trained to pull off extraordinary mental feats, actual computers having been banned following a robot uprising.

De Vries is described as a sadist “twisted” by his Tleilaxu creators, gene manipulators who traffic in artificial biological material and clones called “gholas.” And that’s just some of the terminology involved. You can understand why Dastmalchian may have had difficulty getting into character. “So his work for the Baron and what he needs to achieve for house Harkonnen is dark,” he said. “[W]ith maybe darker or even more serious characters, it’s been really always a gift to know that I’ve always worked for and with collaborators who have created characters — that the motivations behind them are, you know, emotional, whereas Piter is like the computer version of sociopathy.”

"I mean, his curiosity and his ability to harm someone or hurt someone to achieve a goal is as much out of a kind of sick curiosity as it is to achieving the goal that needs to be reached, and that was hard for me."

Still, Dastmalchian praises both Villeneuve and Frank Herbert for their vision. “You could just twist your mustache and be a bad guy and just want to hurt people. You could do that. But that’s not the movie Denis is making, and that’s not the book that Frank Herbert wrote.”

"I mean, the characters in Dune are some of the most well-rounded, some of the most multi-dimensional characters in literature. I mean, it’s incredible when you look at that piece of writing and you look at all the angles at which he wrote about his characters and their relationships to one another. So when I think about how I was going to make Piter move, speak exist. Yeah, really, really interesting."

It sounds like Dastmalchian has acquainted himself quite nicely with his character, which is very exciting for me as a big fan of Dune. There’s a scene in the books where Piter — using his incredibly powerful mental computing — predicts his own master, Baron Harkonnen, is going to kill him, but taunts him with the fact that he knows the time and place it will happen. It’s never a good idea to taunt the Baron, but Piter De Vries is twisted enough not to care. I hope we see that kind of grim play from him in the movie.

Dune arrives in theaters on December 18, 2020.

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