Sting Offered Dune 2's Austin Butler A Very Explicit Costume Accessory

In 2024's "Dune: Part Two," Austin Butler portrayed the sadistic villain Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, Paul Atreides' direct foil in the original Frank Herbert novel. His face-off with Timothée Chalamet's version of Paul is a climactic moment that the entire film builds up to. Feyd-Rautha is vicious, brutal, and downright evil, but that doesn't mean that there's only one way to play him. And since "Dune" has been adapted before, Butler isn't the first actor to bring the villain to life.

Matt Keeslar played Feyd-Rautha in the 2000 Syfy miniseries, "Frank Herbert's Dune," but the more famous prior performance is definitely that of famed musician Sting in David Lynch's adaptation. Sting — real name Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner — remains most famous for being the frontman of The Police, performing hit songs like "Roxanne" and "Every Breath You Take." In the '80s, though, Sting was also quite active on the screen, appearing in productions like "Brimstone and Treacle" before eventually joining the cast of 1984's "Dune."

Like every part of Lynch's "Dune" adaptation, Sting's Feyd-Rautha is bizarre. With an over-the-top performance and a bright shock of orange hair, the actor-musician certainly left a big impression on 1984 audiences. No part of his character stood out more, though, than his eye-catching blue codpiece — a costume addition that Sting apparently offered to Austin Butler.

Austin Butler got the chance to meet Sting at the "Dune: Part Two" premiere. "He came to the premiere," the younger actor said in an interview on "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon." "It was so surreal. My mind was blown. He's the best." While it's always fun to see two different actors unite after playing the same character in different eras, Sting apparently didn't just offer general encouragement to the new Feyd-Rautha. "I asked him about it, and he said he still has the codpiece from the original one," Butler said. "He said he's going to dry-clean it and let me wear it if I want to."

It's nice to see that Sting has a healthy sense of humor about the absurd costume piece these days. The 1984 movie wasn't exactly a hit in its day. In fact, Lynch's "Dune" bombed at the box office, and Sting's codpiece was singled out by many as a particular point of humorous critique. In more recent years, sci-fi fans have embraced Lynch's film as something of a cult classic, praising the strangeness that left viewers baffled upon its initial release.

Butler, fortunately, didn't have to go through that same era of scorn before he got his flowers. His Feyd-Rautha is a lot less silly, and "Dune: Part Two" was a massive hit with critics and audiences alike, something not even a codpiece might have been able to mess up.