David Dastmalchian talks his “twisted” Dune character, Piter de Vries
By Dan Selcke
From playing the Joker’s thug in The Dark Knight to the Penguin in Batman: The Long Halloween to the Polka Dot Man in James Gunn’s upcoming The Suicide Squad, David Dastmalchian has a history of playing villains…and often in DC Comics stuff. But he’ll be playing a different sort of baddie in Denis Villeneuve’s upcoming Dune movie: Piter de Vries, the twisted Mentat.
And what is a Mentat, you ask? In the Dune universe, a Mentat is a person who has been so thoroughly trained in logic and reasoning that they are basically a human computer, actual computers having been banned for millennia (there was a Terminator-style robot war in the distant past, it was a whole thing). Only Piter is special, because he’s sick in the head and willing to use his intelligence to get what he wants even if it means hurting others. His cruel is only surpassed by his boss, the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård). Together, they make formidable enemies for young Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) and his family.
“I guarantee you, any other character I’ve ever played, there are things about them, that they may be extreme, they may look wacky or have some kind of crazy power, but there’s always something I can latch onto and connect to a human being that I’ve either known for a part of my own personality that I’m familiar with, obviously, because it’s me,” Dastmalchian told Slashfilm. “With Piter, there’s that psychopathy that comes from being a twisted Mentat, that is frightening and disturbing. And to put myself in his mindset was hard. So to utter a language, because Piter’s brain operates at such a high level, he is for all intents and purposes, a human computer, speaking in the highly specific way in which the language would come out was actually … It made perfect sense. It seemed to really add a great deal to the character. It felt more like an assist than an obstacle, if that makes sense.”
New Dune movie is “true to the spirit of the novel”
Dastmalchian is a big Dune fan from way back, calling it “by far one of the greatest sci-fi novels ever written.” It sounds like he was already familiar with Piter before taking the job. “Piter de Vries was always utterly fascinating and disturbing and a dark place to go,” he said. “I took a great deal of inspiration from the book. But then when I read the script, I was like, ‘Oh, he’s right there.’ And obviously being in the hands of someone like Denis, it was kind of a no brainer, just what he wanted him to look and move and feel like. Denis is very good at communicating those things.”
"[T]he script is so true to the spirit of the novel. There is an elevated sense of purpose and tone. It’s such grand science fiction storytelling, and it’s so mind-blowing visually. But then when you get down to the characters and the way they speak, you just have to approach it the way that you do with any character. And for me, finding that was very, very challenging. Because Piter [de Vries] is not like any human I’ve ever encountered before."
I’m raising an eyebrow at the movie true to “the spirit” of the book — what about the specifics, Dastmalchian? — but everything I’ve seen so far looks great, so I’ll reserve judgment.
We’ll find out how it all comes together when Dune releases (finally) in theaters and on HBO Max on October 1 of this year.
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