Although 2021’s Dune left the fate of Josh Brolin’s Gurney Halleck in question after Baron Harkonnen’s forces and the Emperor’s Sardaukar troops overthrew House Atreides on Arrakis, readers of the original Frank Herbert-penned novel knew this wouldn’t be the last we’d see of the former Atreides weapons master. Sure enough, Brolin’s character will reunite with Timothée Chalamet’s Paul Atreides in Dune: Part Two, which chronicles the latter half of its source material. This sequel moving forward was especially good news for Gurney, as director Denis Villeneuve made a “weird priority” for the character once Part Two got off the ground.
In the Dune book, Gurney Halleck plays a stringed musical instrument called a baliset, yet throughout all of Villeneuve’s first Dune movie, said instrument was nowhere to be found. The filmmaker and his team did shoot a scene where Brolin was playing the baliset, but it ended up being deleted. That won’t be happening again, because during an interview with Empire, Villeneuve shared that the baliset scene he shot for the sequel remained within the final cut:
