Who the heck is Tim Blake Nelson playing in Dune: Part 2?
The Buster Scruggs star was confirmed to appear in Denis Villeneuve's already-filmed sequel—but as who?
Okay, so this is going to drive us nuts: THR reported earlier today about yet another (and very after-the-fact) casting announcement for Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi sequel, Dune: Part 2, which wrapped up filming back in December of 2022. Specifically, it’s being reported that Tim Blake Nelson—everybody’s favorite singing cowboy/recent Guillermo Del Toro regular/Weird Ed Norton Incredible Hulk cameo, what have you—filmed an appearance in the movie.
All well and good: Dune: Part 2 is gearing up to be even more expansive than the first film, with a decent chunk of characters from Frank Herbert’s book that didn’t make the cut the first time around popping up for the sequel. The difference here, though, being that nobody will say who Nelson is playing.
That’s a little weird, in so far as all of the other parts that have been announced—Florence Pugh as Princess Irulan, Christopher Walken as the Emperor, Austin Butler as Baron Harkonnen’s knife-happy nephew Feyd-Rautha—have come with reveals of, well, the parts. Dune is a very faithful adaptation of a nearly-60-year-old novel, so it’s not like there’s much point in Villeneuve playing coy about plot stuff. So why the secrecy around Nelson? (And, on a related note, the cast is pretty much full at this point, so it’s difficult to try to work out who his part might be; our initial instinct just on vibe would be one of the human-computer Mentats, but those parts are all sewn up.)
The way we figure, this could go one of two ways. The first is that this is just a glorified cameo of sorts: Nelson and Villeneuve have never worked together, but maybe the actor is just a big fan of the books, and wrangled a part as a background Fremen or some such. (Seems like a waste of Nelson’s considerable talents, but so it goes.) The other is that Nelson has some small but pivotal part to play, maybe related to the future or the past of the franchise. (Part Two does, after all, get into the bits of the original book where Timotheé Chalamet’s Paul Atreides starts seriously tripping on see-the-future drugs.) This is all just blatant and unfounded speculation, of course, but it’s got our curiosity racing.