If you’re going to act in a Denis Villeneuve Dune movie, there are generally two ways to go about it. The first is to speak in the hushed, portentous tones that have signified Serious Blockbusters for decades. (I distinctly remember people complaining about such dialogue in M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable before that movie got rehabilitated.) These lines are best delivered with maximum brow-furrowing: “A great man doesn’t seek to lead … [lowered chin, steely glare, vaguely Middle Eastern orchestral sting] he is called to it.â€
The second way is the option available to actors playing the Harkonnen, the saga’s porcine baddies, who strut about their dystopian home-world as if they’re posing for H.R. Giger’s fall fashion line. Going Harkonnen Mode entails acting as if you’re playing every single Bond villain at the same time. The only reason they don’t spend 100 percent of their screen time twirling their mustaches is that they’re all completely hairless. You can be slithery, like David Dastmalchian’s Piter de Vries (a name that makes me wonder what Frank Herbert had against Dutch people); bombastic, like Dave Bautista’s Rabban; or imperious, like Stellan Skarsgård’s Baron. But whatever you do, you’ve got to do it big, and you’ve got to do a voice. (Indeed, it’s a joyous moment in Dune: Part Two when you realize newcomer Austin Butler, as the zero-percent-buccal-fat Feyd-Rautha, is doing Skarsgård’s accent.)
And then there’s Christopher Walken as emperor Shaddam IV, who either does not know or does not care about the way people are supposed to act in Dune movies. If you hire Walken, it doesn’t matter how many veiled Bene Gesserit sisters he’s sharing scenes with; he’s gonna give you Walken. Villeneuve has always painted on an expansive canvas, and now, in addition to the telepathic fetuses and sandworms the size of subway cars, he’s given us something even more otherworldly — an emperor who talks like a guy from Queens.
Alongside Austin Butler and Florence Pugh (who plays his daughter, the princess Irulan), Walken is one of the main additions to the Dune: Part Two cast. Of the trio, fans seemed to embrace Pugh and initially balk at Butler, while Walken was entirely unexpected. “This choice is such a weird decision that I’m honestly excited for it,†one redditor wrote. Shaddam IV in Dune is a bit like a futuristic Holy Roman Emperor: nominally the most powerful man in the universe, but with vassals richer and stronger than he is. Thus, he’s a paranoid ruler who holds his throne through cunning political calculations. Fan’s favored casting was someone like Mads Mikkelsen, urbane and ice-cold.
Walken takes a different approach, which is to play Shaddam IV of the House Corrino, Padishah Emperor of the Known Universe, as if he’s a character in a particularly expensive SNL Digital Short. “This Muad’Dib, some new Fremen prophet,†he tells his daughter, chewing the words around his mouth like a juicy piece of saltwater taffy. “How would you deal with this prophet?†Late in the film, the script even provides an accidental nod to Walken’s most famous SNL appearance, as the emperor implores Skarsgård’s Baron, “More, more. Give me more.†(He’s talking about information, unfortunately, not the ancient Fremen cultural artifact called the cowbell.)
Dune: Part Two reveals that Walken’s emperor was one of the architects of the Atreides’ downfall in Part One, but the film does not demand from him the over-the-top villainy of the Harkonnens. He’s first pictured silently brooding in his garden, and the overall impression of him is an amoral yet ineffectual leader, long past his prime. It makes sense that neither the Harkonnens nor the Atreides take him too seriously; after all, the guy sounds just like Christopher Walken!
This is of course not Walken’s problem, but ours. Throughout Dune Two, I was reminded of the recent Super Bowl commercial, in which Walken attempts to perform a variety of mundane tasks only to be interrupted by passersby who can’t help showing off their impressions of him. It’s like the Nicolas Cage effect: Even if Walken were to deliver a totally normal performance, the layers of humor that have built up around his persona would make it impossible for us to receive it as such. So while Walken seems to be acting in a different movie from his po-faced costars, I prefer to think of his casting as Villeneuve’s tip of the hat to an earlier edition. In its offbeat charm, his performance is the only element in the new Dune that could have come out of David Lynch’s version.
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