A stage veteran enters the desert
Years before Star Trek: The Next Generation carried him into orbit, Patrick Stewart appeared as Gurney Halleck, the Warmaster of House Atreides, in David Lynch's 1984 film version of Dune. Stewart, who has died at 86, was by then an established stage actor in his native England, yet the production was only his third movie. It also marked his first encounter with science fiction, an early step toward the part of Jean-Luc Picard that would define his career.[S1][S3]
According to an excerpt from Kyle MacLachlan's memoir Fictional Selves published by The Hollywood Reporter, Stewart gave the character a weight and composure rooted in classical theater. MacLachlan likened the effect to what Alec Guinness, another English stage-trained actor, had brought to Star Wars. MacLachlan was 24 during the shoot and, like Stewart, was new to film work.[S1]
Voice, presence and practical questions
MacLachlan writes that Stewart's voice was the first thing he noticed. Having spent three years studying stage speech, MacLachlan concluded he could never sound like his colleague, whose tones he described as regal and elegant and shaped by years at the Royal Shakespeare Company. In MacLachlan's account, only Stewart could deliver a line about going forth into the desert like a wild ass and make it sound right. He also recalled Stewart carrying the Atreides battle jacket or the Fremen stillsuit as though he had worn it all his life.[S1]
A longtime admirer of Frank Herbert's novels, MacLachlan says he knew the material better than most people on the production, Lynch included, and became a kind of authority on it. Stewart, he writes, drew on that knowledge to deepen his grasp of Halleck. MacLachlan describes his co-star as combining stately confidence with genuine curiosity, leaning over between takes to ask quietly what was happening in a scene. The two bonded over their theater backgrounds and shared amusement at how far a film set outstripped the scale of a stage production.[S1]
The worm is eight minutes away
For Stewart's inaugural day on set, he and MacLachlan were seated within a partially assembled ornithopter facing a massive blue screen, about to film a flight above the shield wall and Arrakis's Great Desert. MacLachlan remembers Stewart being anxious, quietly asking what waited beneath them: a sandworm bigger than a tractor trailer, consuming a harvester that MacLachlan likened to a rolling metal factory. Stewart answered with grave seriousness about how dangerous the mission was.[S1]
Stewart's key line in the scene was that the worm was eight minutes away. After the first take he asked Lynch how his character would know the creature's distance. MacLachlan writes that he was impressed by how deeply Stewart inhabited the role. Lynch praised the question, then sent a propman to build a gauge with analog hands to be added later. The passage, drawn from Fictional Selves, illustrates Stewart's insistence on treating popular entertainment as seriously as Shakespeare.[S1]
