Robert Pattinson is good at being weird. Really, really good. Despite making a name for himself as a vampiric heartthrob in '00s teen classic Twilight, he's found his footing as more of a character actor than a leading man in the decade-and-a-bit since the quadrilogy wrapped up.
He picks interesting projects, for one thing, working with directors as varied as Christopher Nolan to Lynne Ramsay to Bong Joon-ho in the last five years alone. He's played a lighthouse keeper descending into madness, a series of expendable clones, and even a Studio Ghibli heron (usually, I feel pretty strongly about watching subtitled versions of international films rather than the dub, but I made an exception to hear Pattinson's bonkers turn in the recording booth to voice the titular bird in Hayao Miyazaki's The Boy and the Heron).
Still, he knows how to handle a blockbuster, too. 2022's The Batman was DC's biggest win on the big screen for some time, and its much-delayed sequel The Batman 2 is still one of the most anticipated upcoming releases on DC Studios' slate. What better combination of these two strands of Pattinson's career, then, than Dune 3, in which he joins a blockbuster franchise to play a Weird Guy.
When it dropped earlier this week, the Dune 3 trailer gave us our first look at his character Scytale, a shapeshifting villain from Frank Herbert's novel. He's part of the Bene Tleilax, a mysterious sect of genetically altered humans. "He's an unusual character in the book," the actor recently commented. "I mean, you can't really tell whose side he's on, and it's kind of what makes him quite interesting."
In Dune: Part Three, 17 years have passed since we last set foot on Arrakis, and Paul Atreides is now in the midst of his tyrannical rule as Padishah Emperor – and Scytale's goal is to dethrone him.
I can't believe it's taken this long for Pattinson to get a proper antagonist role under his belt (although, to be fair, his good-for-nothing husband and father Jackson in domestic thriller Die My Love was one of 2025's biggest villains, in my opinion). We got a taste of it in last year's Mickey 17, in which rogue clone Mickey 18 tried to steal the identity of his predecessor, but all the Mickeys got their redemption arc in the end. He's no stranger to moral ambiguity, as we've seen in the Safdies' Good Time, for example, but it's about time he got to go (for want of a better term) full sicko mode.
And Denis Villeneuve does one-and-done Dune villains so well. Austin Butler was the highlight of Dune: Part Two as the incredibly bald and incredibly ruthless Feyd-Rautha, bringing a chilling intensity and a strange vulnerability to the Harkonnen heir. Hopefully, Scytale plays a similar role in the threequel, posing a threat to the rule of House Atreides and disrupting the status quo on Arrakis – and freaking us out in the process.
We know that Pattinson can bring intensity to the role, as he did playing Bruce Wayne, and unpredictability, like he did with wickie Ephraim Winslow in The Lighthouse. We know that he's capable of throwing everything into a role, too, as he did with the Grey Heron. All these qualities make him seem primed to make a Scytale a worthy successor to Feyd-Rautha in raising the stakes of the Dune trilogy – and I hope it's the start of many more villain roles to come.
Dune 3 arrives in theaters on December 18. For more, fill out your watchlist with our guide to 2026's other biggest movie release dates.
