Just when you thought the cast of Dune couldn’t possibly get any more stacked ahead of Part Two, Denis Villenueve only went and dipped back into his bag of tricks to add even more star power to the lineup.
Austin Butler, Florence Pugh, and Christopher Walken are three of the marquee additions this time around, with the former looking suitably creepy as the villainous Feyd-Rautha. Going balder than anybody should realistically want to be, the director somehow made that the least terrifying aspect of the character when describing the new antagonist to Empire.
“Austin brought something that is a cross between a psychopath killer, an Olympic sword master, a snake, and Mick Jagger. He has tremendous sex appeal and charisma and madness. It’s really out there.”
A serpentine swordsman influenced by the iconic Rolling Stones frontman that doesn’t have so much as a follicle to speak of hardly screams “tremendous sex appeal” in our eyes, but each to their own, we suppose. That Butler is a handsome chap, though, even if he’s aiming for a distinctly more unsettling vibe in the blockbuster sci-fi sequel, and it would be fair to say he’s pulling it off with aplomb.
The downside is that audiences have to wait until March 2024 to wrap their eyes around the hotly-anticipated follow-up in all of its glory after Dune: Part Two became the latest casualty of the ongoing strikes, a frustrating outcome when the most obvious solution is simply for the studios to pay writers and actors more.