Timothée Chalamet has shed light on his approach to filming Dune: Part Three, saying he was “more intense” for the final instalment.
The Marty Supreme actor sat down with Matthew McConaughey for Variety and CNN’s town hall event at the University of Texas over the weekend, and named some of the actors he’d drawn inspiration from in his upcoming portrayal of Paul Atreides in the final film of Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi trilogy.
Chalamet played Atreides in 2021’s Dune and its 2024 sequel, Dune: Part Two, with Part Three an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s book Dune Messiah. Out in cinemas this December, Chalamet told McConaughey: “I think you see at the end of the second one, and across the third one, is yourself in ‘Interstellar’ and Heath Ledger in ‘The Dark Knight’ and Marlon Brando in ‘Apocalypse Now’ and stuff like that.”
Backtracking somewhat, he went on: “Actually, wait, let me rephrase all of that! Hold up. I cannot put myself in that same boat. Let’s just say, it’s these big movies where you could sneak in something. A curveball.”
Oscar Isaac, who played Paul’s father Leto Atreides in the first Dune film, was another inspiration to Chalamet. “He treated it in a Shakespearean way, to play it heightened and not really care about it being heightened,” Chalamet said, adding that watching Isaac at work encouraged him to take “more liberty than ever.”
“On the first “Dune” film, “I felt kind of thrown by the futurism,” he continued. “I was coming off ‘Beautiful Boy’ and ‘Call Me by Your Name’ and movies that were a lot more naturalistic, and this was a huge movie, so I felt intimidated. But especially on this third one, all the great s*** you see on screen is from freedom of movement and freedom of choice. And with Denis, we really had a good rhythm. It’s the eeriest one. It’s a big swing.”
Chalamet felt that “the bat was red-hot” while filming Dune: Part Three following his turns in Marty Supreme and A Complete Unknown, both of which earned him Oscar nominations for Best Actor.
“I didn’t want to be complacent about a single moment. Everything was sacred, and it was my last time doing a ‘Dune’ film, so I really wanted to treat it as sacred. Because people can get complacent, but I was more intense on the third one. It felt like that was the natural momentum, so I wanted to push against that as hard as I could.”
While he didn’t say much about the plot of the forthcoming film, he did discuss the sci-fi technology they employed. “On the first ‘Dune,’ we had an ornithopter sequence that I got a chance to do again in the third, but this time I was way more geared up,” he said. “On ‘Dune 3,’ as opposed to the first movie, I came out early and studied the control panel — all sorts of hieroglyphics and things that aren’t tethered to reality. I wanted to know what each button did, and invent a dynamic for myself with it.”
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