Sting is my favorite part of David Lynch’s Dune

Poor Sting. In 1983, the frontman of The Police was at the height of his popularity. The trio’s fifth album, Synchronicity, topped the Billboard charts for 17 nonconsecutive weeks during the summer of ’83, interrupted only by Michael Jackson’s Thriller. The year prior, Sting landed a breakout acting role in the film adaptation of Brimstone and Treacle, playing a conman-pickpocket-rapist — a role that seemed destined to launch a small but respectable film career.

Then he joined the cast of David Lynch’s Dune, a troubled adaptation that nearly spelled the end of Sting’s acting ambitions.

Sting, real name Gordon Sumner, was recruited by Lynch to play Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, nephew of the Baron Vladimir and the bloodthirsty foil to Kyle MacLachlan’s Paul Atreides. Sting’s Feyd-Rautha appears only briefly in Dune — he has less than 10 minutes of screen time — but his role is a memorable one, mostly for the wrong reasons.

The most notorious bit of Sting’s role in Dune comes about 90 minutes into the film, when he emerges from a steamy bath and directly into the lustful gaze of Baron Harkonnen. Sting’s Feyd struts into frame wearing nothing but a winged leather codpiece and a thin layer of glistening oil, giving him the sweaty sheen that was the cinematic style of the time. Feyd stretches and flexes. Sting’s lithe, cocaine-chiseled figure pops against the all-black background of the shot. He works Baron Harkonnen into a lather in a gratuitous, narratively detached shot.

Image: Universal Pictures

Sting’s codpiece has since become legend. Half of the Dune promo photos available on Getty Images are of Sting in his little leather pants. In 2020, The Telegraph bashed Feyd’s minimal wardrobe as “the codpiece that killed Dune” and made Sting a “laughing stock.”

The Telegraph’s piece also regales us with a story that Sting and Lynch originally planned to have Feyd emerge from his steamy chamber fully nude, but that producers squashed that plan, fearing an R rating for the $40 million film. Allegedly, the codpiece was hastily assembled to cover up Feyd’s sandworm. Sting later called them “the flying underpants.”

That story, juicy though it is, appears to be untrue. Sting told Sounds magazine in 1983 that he was playing Feyd, “a villain with a huge codpiece,” in the project he was then excited to start filming.

Sting’s other big moment in Dune is the film’s climactic battle between Feyd-Rautha and Paul Atreides, in which the latter emerges victorious. Just as he does when Feyd is introduced in the film, Sting delivers a series of menacing, slightly unhinged wide-eyed glares. “I will kill him!” Feyd shouts maniacally as he and Paul exchange blows. That line (“I will kill him!”) I now associate with two things: Lynch’s Dune and Mystery Science Theater 3000, where Sting’s reading was repeated as one of the show’s long-running gags.

Laughing stock? Maybe. But Sting brings a chaotic energy to Dune that makes the actor one of my favorite parts of the film. He’s so amusingly unhinged as Feyd-Rautha. And if I had the body fat percentage that Sting had in 1983, I’d be out there strutting in codpieces left and right.

Image: HBO

In Sting’s defense, Sting didn’t really want to be in Dune. He did not have blockbuster sci-fi acting ambitions, and was coaxed into the role by Lynch, who had seen him in Brimstone and Treacle.

“I’m doing Dune because of David Lynch and for no other reason,” Sting told Rolling Stone in a 1983 interview. “I didn’t really want to do the movie, because I didn’t think it was wise for me to be in an enormous movie. I’d rather keep a groundswell building up in my movie career. So, I sort of went along dragging my heels. Then I met David and I loved him. He’s a madman in sheep’s clothing, and I just felt I had to do the movie because I know he’s going to do something extraordinary.”

Sting later said he felt exploited by the producers of Dune, who had put him front and center in the film’s marketing, despite his small role, to capitalize on his and The Police’s popularity. “I was very angry about it,” he told Australia’s The Courier Mail in 1985. “The publicity machine panicked about a film that cost [$40 million] and they did anything in their power to sell it. I didn’t even like the film. I don’t have a clue what it was about. It was very confusing.”

Years later, with a handful of additional acting credits to his name, Sting told Sky Magazine in 1987, “I keep a low profile about movies, now. If I have a small part — which I don’t mind — I don’t do publicity. If my character is essential to the plot, I do my piece.”

While Sting’s electrifying appearance as Feyd-Rautha may be remembered as just one disastrous component of a larger, massive failure, his casting in the role has a precedent of sorts. In the original, aborted attempt to adapt Dune under Alejandro Jodorowsky, the part of Feyd was supposed to go to another British rocker: Mick Jagger from The Rolling Stones.

Austin Butler, who plays Feyd-Rautha in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two, will apparently honor that history. Villeneuve told Empire last year that Butler’s take on the Harkonnen is “a cross between a psychopath killer, an Olympic sword master, a snake, and Mick Jagger.”

Personally, I hope Butler works a little Sting into that melange of inspiration as well.