“Elvis” star Austin Butler, who went all-out on his method acting to portray the King, Elvis Presley, in Baz Luhrmann’s 2022 movie, said he’s toning it down for his next big-screen role.
Butler, 32, co-stars as uber-villain Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen in “Dune: Part Two,” which hits theaters March 1.
“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,” Butler told the Los Angeles Times in an interview with the movie’s director, Denis Villeneuve.
“With Feyd, I knew that that would be unhealthy for my family and friends.”
Butler was so immersed in playing Elvis Presley in “Elvis” that, for a long time after finishing his role on the movie, he still spoke in Presley’s Southern drawl.
Villeneuve joked that, if Butler absorbed himself as much in Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen as he did with Presley, it would also be unhealthy for the director.
“So I made a conscious decision to have a boundary,” Butler said. “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,” he said. “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, I think.”
In “Dune: Part Two,” Butler plays a new character in the Harkonnen family who, in “Dune: Part One,” were the bitter enemies of Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) and his family.
Feyd-Rautha, who is hairless and appears phantom-like, is the nephew of Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård), played by Sting in the 1984 movie “Dune” with spiky hair and a winged codpiece.
In “Dune: Part One,” Paul survived the Harkonnens’ attack on his family and the murder of his father (Oscar Isaac).
In “Dune: Part Two,” according to the movie’s trailers, Feyd-Rautha is given the job of tracking down and killing Paul in alliance with Chani (Zendaya) and the Fremen in his bid to rule the desert planet Arrakis.
Villeneuve had nice words for Butler in their LA Times interview.
“Working with you was tremendously playful. When the camera was on, it was like you were possessed,” he said.
“When the camera was off, you were still maybe 25 or 30% Feyd,” he added, “just enough to still be present and focus but removed enough that you didn’t kill anybody on set.”