The 'Elvis' actor remembers running into the 72-year-old British singer who originally played his villainous character, Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, in the 1984 movie.
- Mar 1, 2024
AceShowbiz - Sting has offered Austin Butler his underwear from the original "Dune" movie. The 32-year-old actor portrays Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen in the sci-fi epic sequel, and his character was first portrayed by the "Fields of Gold" hitmaker in the original 1984 adaptation of Frank Herbert's novel.
"It was so surreal. My mind was blown," Butler told "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon" after the pair met at the premiere in New York City over the weekend.
"He's the best... He came up afterward, and he was so, so, lovely and just debonair. I asked him about [starring in the original Dune movie] and he said he still has the codpiece from the original [Dune], he said he's going to dry clean it and let me wear it if I want to."
The character didn't appear in 2021 movie "Dune: Part One", but he's set to serve as a main antagonist in the sequel. When it came to bringing Feyd-Rautha to life, his version is a totally bald and utterly ruthless killer.
He added, "The thing with a villainous character - I'd never played a character quite like him, and I didn't want to judge him, so it was a lot of imagining what his childhood was like."
However, Butler made sure to tone down his method acting for the role, having previously thrown himself all in for "Elvis". He told the Los Angeles Times newspaper, "I've definitely in the past, with 'Elvis', explored living within that world for three years and that being the only thing that I think about day and night. With Feyd, I knew that that would be unhealthy for my family and friends."
He continued, "So I made a conscious decision to have a boundary. It allowed for more freedom between action and cut because I knew I was going to protect everybody else outside of the context of what we were doing."
"That's not to say that it doesn't bleed into your life. But I knew that I wasn't going to do anything dangerous outside of that boundary, and in a way that allowed me to go deeper."
