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Dune 2: Feyd-Rautha Actor Has Begun Knife Training For Villain Role
Dune 2 actor Austin Butler has begun knife training for his role as Harkonnen villain Feyd-Rautha in the second half of Denis Villeneuve's epic.

Dune 2: Feyd-Rautha Actor Has Begun Knife Training For Villain Role

Dune 2 star Austin Butler has begun knife training for his role as Feyd-Rautha in the sci-fi epic. Denis Villeneuve’s vision of Frank Herbert’s Dune will be completed with the second installment in his planned two-parter. This after 2021’s Dune: Part 1 took in a respectable $400 million at the worldwide box office.

The first part of Villeneuve’s Dune of course introduced many of the original novel’s most important characters, including messianic hero Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), mysterious Fremen Chani (Zendaya) and evil villain Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård). A few main Dune characters were however left out of the first film so they could be introduced in dramatic fashion in Dune: Part 2. One of the most important of these delayed characters is of course Feyd-Rautha, the cold-blooded nephew of Baron Harkonnen. Played memorably in the 1984 Dune movie by Sting, Feyd makes it his purpose to personally kill Paul Atreides, leading to a climactic knife fight. For Dune: Part 2, Villeneuve has turned to Elvis and Once Upon a Time In Hollywood actor Butler to take on the role of villainous Feyd.

Knife fighting was of course already introduced as an important part of the story in Dune: Part 1, thanks to a major sequence where Paul battles the Fremen Jamis (Babs Olusanmokun) to the death. And fans of the Dune novel and original movie know that Paul’s skills with the knife will once again be put to the test in the second half of the story thanks to Feyd. It’s a somewhat significant piece of news then that Butler is confirmed to have started knife training for his role in Dune: Part 2 (via the New York Times).

Butler of course was not the only actor considered to take on the role of knife-happy Feyd in Villeneuve’s Dune continuation. Reportedly, Dunkirk star Harry Styles and Ready Player One actor Tye Sheridan were also considered for the part before Butler sewed it up. Fans for their part seemed to want Barry Keoghan for the role of Feyd-Rautha, but he ended up playing a different iconic villain, nabbing the role of The Joker in Matt Reeves’ The Batman.

That eventual Feyd actor Butler has begun knife training only serves as seeming confirmation that the climactic knife fight between Paul and his Harkonnen nemesis will in fact be included in Dune: Part 2. This should come as no surprise though given how closely Villeneuve followed the story from the original Dune novel in the first half of his epic film. Dune fans of course would have been very disappointed had Villeneuve elected to deviate from Herbert’s story by not having Feyd and Paul square off. On the evidence provided by Paul’s big knife fight in Dune: Part 1, the battle between Paul and Feyd in Dune 2 should be incredibly compelling (even if book readers already know how it turns out) and definitely more impressive than the somewhat anti-climactic knife battle between Sting and Kyle MacLachlan in David Lynch’s spotty 1984 Dune.