Dune 2 Actor Stellan Skarsgaard Refused CG For Pirates Films, Preferred Practical Effects Instead

Dune: Part Two is now out in cinemas–and scoring big at the box office–thanks in part to actor Stellan Skarsgaard putting in a scene-stealing performance as the villainous Vladimir Harkonnen. Skarsgaard is almost unrecognizable beneath the mountain of prosthetics used to give him an intimidating presence in the film, and it’s not the first time the actor has sat for hours in a make-up chair as special effects artists work their craft on him, as back in the late 2000s, he portrayed the barnacle-infested Bootstrap Bill Turner in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest and At World’s End.

In an interview for the Dune sequel, Skarsgaard explained how even then, he preferred wearing prosthetics to help him with his performance as opposed to other actors who wore motion-capture suits and had tracking dots on their faces for post-production special effects work.

“I was the only one on set with real prosthetics on,” Skarsgaard said to Business Insider. “Everyone else on that ship showed up five minutes before we started shooting and had dots put on their face, and away they went. I had been there for six hours. But the thing is, I like it. I like to see the artists paint, if that makes sense.”

Dune: Part Two is earning high praise from a variety of publications across the internet, and here at GameSpot, the film earned a score of 9/10. “While Villeneuve’s first Dune movie felt like an attempt to deliver the objectively definitive big-screen adaptation of Frank Hebert’s Dune, Part Two feels like Villeneuve putting more of himself and his own perspective into this story,” Phil Owen wrote in GameSpot’s Dune: Part Two review.

Skarsgaard will be back in the second season of Star Wars: Andor as the spymaster Luthen Rael, and the actor believes we may see the highly anticipated series arrive before the end of the year.