It’s a good time to be Austin Butler. The 2023 Oscar nominations were revealed the other day, and the 31-year-old actor is up for Best Actor for his turn as cultural icon Elvis Presley in Elvis. The biopic is up for eight Oscars in total, including Best Picture. Last month Butler was up for a Golden Globe for his work in the movie, so there’s a lot of buzz around him at present.
Butler will be in the highly anticipated sequel to 2021’s Dune as the villainous Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, a character once played by Sting in David Lynch’s 1984 Dune movie. In case you’ve forgotten, this was his introduction:
No doubt Butler’s rendition will be a little less outrageous, given the grimmer tone and palette of the first Dune movie.
Austin Butler: Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen is “so different from anything I’ve ever done before”
Speaking to Deadline, Butler said that he was “a huge fan” of Villeneuve’s first Dune movie, calling the director “an incredible filmmaker, and an amazing person.”
"We had a blast getting to collaborate on this,. It was just so much fun for me, especially playing this role, to get to do something so different from anything I’ve ever done before."
Feyd-Rautha is the nephew of the devious Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, played by Stellan Skarsgård, and serves as one of the main antagonists of Frank Herbert’s Dune novel. He’s a foil to Timothée Chalamet’s Paul Atriedes, so expect the two to come into conflict.
Dune Part 2 wrapped filming last month, and is currently slated to hit theaters on November 3.
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