Timothée Chalamet has remained silent about Dune: Part 3, which will be released in theaters in December of this year. But Chalamet revealed some new details about the inspiration for his portrayal of Paul Atreides in Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi trilogy when he spoke with Matthew McConaughey at Variety and CNN’s town hall event at the University of Texas at Austin.
“What you see at the end of the second movie and the end of the third movie is yourself in ‘Interstellar,’ Heath Ledger in ‘The Dark Knight,’ Marlon Brando in ‘Apocalypse Now,'” he told McConaughey, before backtracking a bit. “Actually, wait, let me rephrase everything. Wait, I can’t be in the same situation,” he said with a laugh. “I’m telling you, in these big movies, you can sneak things in. Curve balls.”
Another inspiration for Chalamet was Oscar Isaac, who played Leto Atreides, Paul’s father, in the first Dune movie. “He handled it in a Shakespearean way, where he played it high and didn’t really care about the high,” Chalamet said. Seeing Isaac encouraged him to “act more freely than ever before.” “I felt like I was thrown into futurism,” Chalamet said of the first Dune movie. “I had come away from more naturalistic films like “Beautiful Boy” and “Call Me By Your Name,” and this was a huge movie, so I was intimidated. But especially with this third movie, all the great things you see on screen come from freedom of movement and freedom of choice. And with Dennis, we had a really good rhythm. It’s the creepiest thing. Big swings.”
Chalamet didn’t say much about the plot of his new film, but he did talk about the sci-fi technology. “There was a flapping flight sequence in the first Dune, and I had a chance to do it again in the third, but this time I was more prepared,” he said. “With Dune 3, as opposed to the first movie, I came out early and studied the control panel. I studied all kinds of hieroglyphs and things that weren’t connected to reality. I wanted to know what each button did and invent my own dynamics with it.”
Chalamet said he felt “bat red” while filming Dune: Part 3 after receiving Best Actor Oscar nominations for Marty Supreme and Completely Unknown. “I didn’t want to get complacent for a second. Everything was sacred, and it was the last Dune movie I was going to do, so I really wanted to treat it like something sacred. People tend to get complacent, but in the third movie, I was more into it. I felt like it was a natural force, and I wanted to fight it as hard as I could.”
“CNN & Variety Town Hall Event: Timothée Chalamet and Matthew McConaughey” will air on CNN on Saturday, February 21st at 7pm and streamed on the CNN app.
