Although Austin Butler first came to prominence in the mid-to-late 2000s from his early performances on TV shows like Zoey 101 and Ruby & the Rockits, the last several years have seen him morph into a bonafide movie star thanks to the likes of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Elvis, the latter of which netted him an Academy Award nomination. Next year, Butler will venture into sci-fi territory with Dune: Part Two, and the actor has talked about how the “terror of the challenge” led to him agreeing to play Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, one of the 2024 movie release’s prominent new characters.
Butler was first reported to be in talks to play Baron Vladimir Harkonnen’s youngest nephew back in March 2022, five months after it was confirmed filmmaker Denis Villenuve would get to chronicle the second half of Frank Herbert’s classic 1965 novel on the big screen. Butler’s casting was confirmed shortly thereafter, and as the actor recalled while chatting with Dune: Part Two costar Josh Brolin for Interview Magazine, although he was nervous to play the role, it’s fear that is now one of the primary factors to him joining a project:
I’m always nervous. I always feel an incredible pressure. I felt that when I was 12 years old. Even if the material doesn’t really require it, I feel I need to do the best that I possibly can. That sets a bar, and then I’m always afraid that I’m going to miss something. With Dune it was interesting, because I met with Denis [Villeneuve], and we got along very well, and started talking about the character. At that point, we didn’t even have a script, but as we started talking about Feyd, my imagination started running, and I started to feel the terror of the challenge. That’s what I’m guided by now: What really scares me?
Austin Butler is the third actor to play Feyd-Rautha, following behind Sting in David Lynch’s Dune and Matt Keeslar in the Frank Herbert’s Dune TV miniseries. Even though a script wasn’t ready by the time he met with Denis Villeneuve, he was already feeling the pressure of playing this character, but that was more than enough incentive for him to decide Dune: Part Two was worth doing. After all, terror is what motivated him while he was performing in Elvis (which can be viewed with a Max subscription), with the actor continuing:
Because Elvis was terrifying. There was so much pressure, and I was constantly asking myself, ‘Am I enough? Can I pull off this tightrope act?’ That makes you focus and work really hard. The wonderful thing about the reception of that film was realizing that even though I had that terror and questioned my own ability, if I put in the hard work, I set myself up to hopefully affect some people. It means I’m now able to see that terror as a separate thing, and not let it rule me, and instead look at it and go, ‘I see you. I hear you. I’m not going to let you cripple me.’ And then it becomes this jet fuel that makes you wake up at four in the morning with your heart pounding, and you go, ‘Okay, let’s get to work. Let’s start working on the voice. Let’s start working on the body. Let’s start working on the text.’
While the public still has a ways to go to see Butler’s performance in Dune: Part Two, there’s already quite a bit of hype surrounding it. Villeneuve likened it to a snake, Mick Jagger and more, and Stephen McKinley Henderson, another member of the next Dune movie’s cast, said that Butler was “quite chilling” as Feyd-Rautha. Other newcomers who will appear in Part Two include Florence Pugh, Christopher Walken and Léa Seydoux, and Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Rebecca Ferguson, Javier Bardem, Stellan Skarsgård and Dave Bautista are among the other returning faces.
Dune: Part Two opens in theaters on March 15, 2024. If you’d like to revisit Denis Villeneuve’s first Dune movie, it can be accessed either on Max or with a Netflix subscription. Austin Butler is also set to star opposite Tom Hardy in The Bikeriders, but that’s now been removed from the 2023 movies calendar after previously being set for December 1.