LOS ANGELES— Timothée Chalamet and Austin Butler were really looking forward to their fight.
The actors had been training, separately, with a Kali instructor in Los Angeles to prepare for the climactic showdown between Paul Atreides and Feyd Rautha in Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune: Part Two. ” When they finally met in Budapest, they weren’t even technically supposed to do a run through. But they couldn’t hide their excitement.
“We got after it right away,” Chalamet said.
Everyone in the ensemble gets a little starry-eyed talking about that fight. It was a spectacle watching Butler and Chalamet do it all themselves, a few times in near continuous takes for the wide shots.
“It felt like standing in the wings before you walk out on stage or something, that incredible intensity that you feel. And then ‘Action!’ is called. And we just got to work,” Butler said. “That’s the moment of truth where you want to just leave it all on the field.”
But it was also the rare occasion in which most of the cast, including Zendaya,Florence Pugh, Josh Brolin, Stellan Skarsgård, Christopher Walken, Charlotte Rampling, Rebecca Ferguson and Javier Bardem, were in the same room together.
Pugh, a newcomer to the world of “Dune” as the Emperor’s daughter, Princess Irulan, described the atmosphere in the room as a “fizzing energy that can only at that point, you hope, create greatness.”
Leaving it on the field wasn’t just Butler’s goal in the fight. It seemed to be the guiding principle for everyone who got the chance to return to Arrakis for “Part Two,” which opens March 1. The sequel had not been a given and was dependent on the success of “ Part One,” which had its own handicap being released simultaneously on Max (formerly HBOMax) and in theaters.
Chalamet worried that they’d end on an incomplete arc. Other actors, like Zendaya as a Freman fighter (and object of Paul’s affections) Chani and Bautista as Harkonnen thug Beast Rabban, had barely even scratched the surface of their characters in “Part One.”
“That uncertainty was uncomfortable,” said Bautista. “My payoff for the character was in the second film.”
The time in between gave Zendaya and Chalamet breathing room to establish a real friendship with one another, before their characters would have to fall in love in “Part Two” – in the midst of all the heightened stakes.
“What I appreciate about the love story is that it is earned,” Zendaya said. “A real wall has to be broken down.”
But it was a relief to get the official go, even if they knew a lot of sweat and discomfort awaited in order to bring this ambitious and visionary science fiction world to life, with the action upped threefold.
“It’s grueling, but it’s a grueling that I like personally,” said Brolin, returning as Gurney Halleck. “I like challenging my idea of comfort often.”
Some were more daunted by the return, like Skarsgård, knowing that he’d once again have to endure eight hours of sitting completely still to become Baron Harkonnen. The look would include a cooling vest and over 80 pounds (36 kilograms) of rubber suiting that made moving difficult and bathroom breaks impossible.
“I wasn’t that thrilled by it because I thought about those hours in makeup,” Skarsgård said. “But on the other hand, I really love the character, not because he’s psychologically portrayed very elegantly, but because we managed to create a presence… He is used in very few scenes, but he will still hover over the entire film as a dangerous, dangerous thing.”
