Austin Butler improvised his “Dune 2” kiss with Stellan Skarsgård

The actor gives his onscreen uncle an unsettling smooch in the sequel.

Austin Butler's unnerving kiss with Stellan Skarsgård in the Dune sequel was completely improvised.

In the film, there's a sequence where Butler's Feyd-Rautha — a foil to Timothée Chalamet's Paul Atreides — smooches his onscreen uncle, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (played by Skarsgård), that speaks to the young antagonist's devotion to his uncle.

In conversation with Access Hollywood, Butler hailed Skarsgård as "game for anything." He said, "He's the best… it’s always about how you’re trying to affect somebody else."

The sadistic Feyd-Rautha, chosen as the heir of the house, was raised by his villainous uncle, evolving into a cunning young man who would attempt to dethrone Skarsgård's Baron and lead the Harkonnen family.

As a result, Butler — who earned his first Oscar nomination for his role as Elvis Presley in Baz Luhrmann's biopic last year — worked hard to shed the drawl of the King of Rock and Roll to instead embody the voice of costar Skarsgård.

“I felt that because he grew up with the Baron, the Baron would be a big influence on him in many ways,” Butler said in EW's Dune 2 cover story published last month. “So then I started thinking about the way that he speaks, and that being linked to the person that you see with the most power from the time that you're a child, who you do end up emulating in some way.”

And this time around, Butler decided to forego Method acting for the otherwise dark role. "I’ve definitely in the past, with Elvis, explored living within that world for three years and that being the only thing that I think about day and night," he told the Los Angeles Times last month. "With Feyd, I knew that that would be unhealthy for my family and friends."

"I made a conscious decision to have a boundary," Butler added. "It allowed for more freedom between action and cut because I knew I was going to protect everybody else outside of the context of what we were doing. That’s not to say that it doesn’t bleed into your life. But I knew that I wasn’t going to do anything dangerous outside of that boundary, and in a way that allowed me to go deeper, I think."

Let's kiss to that!

Want more movie news? Sign up for Entertainment Weekly's free newsletter to get the latest trailers, celebrity interviews, film reviews, and more.

Related content:

• Inside the Dune dynasty: Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Austin Butler, and Florence Pugh dig into the battle for Arrakis

• Inside that epic Dune: Part 2 duel between Timothée Chalamet and Austin Butler

• Denis Villeneuve wants to make 'at least three' Dune movies

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.