Timothée Chalamet and Austin Butler Tease Ferocious “Dune: Part Two” Fight

That rumbling you hear is the sandworm-sized excitement building over Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two, which premieres in less than a month, with tickets already on sale. This means that final trailers, final images, and some fresh insights from the filmmakers and stars are coming your way. In that vein, Warner Bros. has revealed a slew of new images, while stars Timothée Chalamet and Austin Butler recently sat down with Collider and revealed a bit about the epic clash to come between Chalamet’s Paul Atreides and Butler’s Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen.

The fight between Paul Atreides and Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen is one of the most thrilling moments in Frank Herbert’s original book, a ferocious clash with galactic implications. When we spoke to Dune: Part One and Two co-writer Jon Spaihts about the first film, he explained that he and Villeneuve had left much of the most thrilling action from Herbert’s 1965 novel for the second installment, choosing to focus Part One on the treachery and galactic scheming that led the galaxy to the brink of all-out war. 

“That was a bit of a high-wire act,” Spaihts said of breaking the story into two parts. “Everyone’s adaptation will require streamlining, but stuffing something as big as Dune into a single feature; you’d have to cut so much that the essence would be harmed. But, at the outset, I did not see with certainty how we’d get two satisfying arcs out of those two parts. That decision, in our case, had two components. One was there’s a big villain storyline that fans of the book will know, that we shoved into part two.” (Butler’s Feyd-Rauth Harkonnen.) “The point at which Dune: Part One ends, with Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) and Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) off into the desert, fans of the book would know we’d already have met Feyd in a bravura scene in a fighting arena. But that would have felt extraneous in the movie we were writing, so we shoved that into the future to make that character essential to part two. That makes Part One more cleanly the Greek tragedy of House Atreides, their hubris, their earnestness, and the betrayal that brings them down.”

Now that we’ve reached Part Two, Chalamet and Butler were able to provide some details about how much training and planning went into capturing that fight.

“We were so fortunate to have the greatest stunt team in the world, so we both trained for months before we even met before we were in Hungary,” Butler told Collider. “My training colleague was a guy named Alvin, and then Roger Yuan came on board and started getting more and more specific with us about what the fight was going to be. It went through many different incarnations in a way, that fight. Then, our first meeting was in the stunt room, and we fought immediately, and so we just knew that this was gonna be this thing that was really vital. I mean, that’s kind of where we bonded, and I saw how hard Timothée had worked on it.”

Part Two picks up with Paul and Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) now out in the vast desert of Arrakis, relying on the Fremen, led by Stilgar (Javier Bardem) and Paul’s love interest and crucial ally, Chani (Zendaya), to help them survive. There’s a war coming, however, with House Harkonnen and Emperor Shaddam IV’s (Christopher Walken) vast intergalactic armies coming to wipe out what’s left of House Atreides and the native Fremen entirely. Major characters from Herbert’s book who were left out of Part One will be joining new arrivals Feyd-Rautha and Emperor Shaddam IV, including Princess Irulan Corrino (Florence Pugh) and Lady Margot (Léa Seydoux).

The new images include our featured photo, which shows Paul and Feyd-Rautha facing off. Fresh looks at Chani, Lady Jessica, and Part One‘s main villain, Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård), are also included.

It’s going to be one of the biggest movies of the year, and it’s right around the corner.

Check out the new photos below. Dune: Part Two arrives in theaters on March 1:

For more on Dune: Part Two, check out these stories:

Two New “Dune: Part Two” Teasers Arrive as Tickets Go on Sale

New “Dune: Part Two” Images Unleash Austin Butler’s Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen

A New “Dune: Part Two” Trailer Brings the War to Arrakis

“Dune: Part Two” Moves Up Two Weeks, Secures IMAX 70mm Screens

Featured image: Caption: (L-r) TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET as Paul Atreides and AUSTIN BUTLER as Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen in Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE: PART TWO,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Niko Tavernise