Man of the moment Austin Butler regularly tops the charts on highly regarded “sexiest man alive” polls. But in his latest role in Dune: Part 2, Butler plays a Voldemort-adjacent eyebrowless villain with black teeth, a bald head, and a penchant for disembowelling women.
We caught up with him at the film’s London premiere to find out what it was like going from heartthrob to Harkonnen. “It was freeing,” he said, “because you’re not trying to be anything else”. The best part about it, apparently, was the bald cap. “It was so nice not to have hair. Especially after Elvis, where the hair was everything”.
Butler wore six different wigs to emulate the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll’s raven quiff for the Elvis biopic, and the film’s director Baz Luhrmann was a fastidious taskmaster. “He was obsessed with hair,” Butler said, “to the point where he would fix each strand between takes.” One of Luhrmann’s famous lines on set was, “The hair has spoken, so we can roll the cameras.”
That’s not to say Butler didn’t spend hours in hair and makeup to transform into Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, his character in Dune 2. Yet some of his beauty secrets are surprisingly analogue. The trick to getting those teeth? “They put black dye inside an Invisalign,” Butler said. It does take some of the sting out of his character’s tail when you know he’s wearing a retainer.
Dune’s stars put on a glamorous display for the premiere, before decamping to the Old Sessions House in Clerkenwell for a raucous afterparty. The Londoner spotted co-stars Zendaya and Timothee Chalamet tearing up the dance floor to noughties anthems, late into the night.
