No secret was ever made of the fact that Austin Butler went above and beyond to allow the spirit of Elvis Presley to possess his body for Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis. Fortunately, Butler realized that sort of all-immersive approach isn’t suited for every role.
This time around, Butler’s shoring up the star-studded cast of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two, and those of you even tangentially familiar with his character Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen know that, in this case, a Method acting approach would have been an unmitigated disaster.
Speaking recently to the Los Angeles Times, Butler compared and contrasted the approach he took for Elvis and that of Feyd-Rautha, noting that immersing himself in the King of Rock is one thing, and Method acting a sadistic, bloodthirsty killer is quite another.
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. So I made a conscious decision to have a boundary. 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.
From the glimpses we’ve gotten of Butler’s vicious bald head in the Part Two trailers, it doesn’t seem like the actor’s reeled-in approach to the House Harkonnen successor harmed his performance whatsoever. Indeed, this on-screen iteration of Feyd-Rautha looks to be oozing ruthless tenacity in every frame, and judging by the number of jugulars he’s probably going to dice up across the film’s runtime, I daresay that taking a Method approach to this character would have actually been the biggest possible drawback to this performance, in that there would be no one left alive on set to make the movie in the first place.
Dune: Part Two hits theaters on March 1.
(featured image: Warner Bros. Pictures)
