Kyle MacLachlan, Star of David Lynch’s ‘Dune,’ Was the Only One on Set Who Knew What ‘Dune’ Was About

Filming out in the Chihuahuan Desert is actually chilly in the morning, but when the sun comes up, the heat is unreal. Just biblical. With the camera crew setting up in the distance and the wind not cooperating, Patrick Stewart and I sweat in our “stillsuits” and wait. In the world of Dune, the suit transforms the sweat into drinking water; but in the Mexican desert, the sweat just pools, sticks to my skin and runs down my arms. The custom-fit suit is a near-torture device of costuming that severely limits my ability to move. It’s like fighting against a giant rubber band wrapped around my body. When the suit is zipped all the way up, I can’t even raise my arms. Not ideal. The key, I’m learning, is to limit unnecessary movement. Or, really, any.

Wondering how much longer before we roll, I turn to see David Lynch, the film’s director, up on a desert dune in a yellow hat, white collared shirt, the shortest shorts on earth, and brown loafers with white socks pulled up to his knees. (He has a particular distaste for sand in his shoes.) He’s talking to cinematographer Freddie Francis, shirtless in a boater hat, and to the assistant director, José “Kuki” López Rodero, in a white panama hat. They are huddled together around the camera, looking like a bizarre collection of bandits.

Freddie’s crew is setting up big silver reflectors to light the actors’ faces, which bounce the sunlight right into our eyeballs. Brutal. (Now I understand why Clint Eastwood characters are always squinting.)

In the distance, across the Samalayuca Dune Fields, men are burn­ing old tires to get the right color and intensity of black smoke. As a key point of the plot, the planet Arrakis, aka Dune, doesn’t have water; thus, it has no blue sky. But of course, Mexico does. Can’t get around that. So, our intrepid director, the 37-year-old for­mer Eagle Scout from Montana, the Oscar-nominated visionary be­hind Eraserhead and The Elephant Man, Lynch has taken on the not-inconsiderable task of blotting out the sky.

Those tires are still burning in the distance, but now the black smoke is moving in the wrong direction, away from us. So, we wait. We can blot out the sky, rip up the desert, but we can’t control which way the wind blows.

Assuming it’ll be some time, I unzip my stillsuit to down around my torso and tie the arms around my waist, my black T-shirt comically drenched: I’m now half Paul, half Kyle. Both of us carrying a lot on our minds — and shoulders.

Dune is populated by an impressive list of international talent on and off camera: acclaimed actors like Max von Sydow, Francesca Annis, Jürgen Prochnow; up-and-comers like Blade Runner’s Sean Young and gigantic stars like Sting; top craftsmen like Oscar-winning cinematographer Freddie Francis, Tony Masters (Stanley Kubrick’s production designer), effects wizard Kit West (Raiders of the Lost Ark), creature creator Carlo Rambaldi (who also designed E.T.), and famed costume designer Bob Ringwood, whose Batman suit five years later will be modeled on the “fetish industrial” look of Dune’s rubber stillsuits.

In Mexico for budgetary reasons, the day-to-day production has customs issues, technology issues, communication issues, construction issues, electricity issues, on top of the typical challenges that come with a movie of this size and complexity. The power goes out regularly — our home base, Mexico City, has brownouts — and the crew on the soundstages often have to switch to generators. It’s a real roll-with-the-punches situation, an adventure in the grandest sense of the word. When I first arrive, I am wide-eyed, viewing the project as a throwback to the “sword and sandal” movies of the 1950s and early ’60s that I used to watch on TV. Go off somewhere impossible and exotic and come back and hope you have a movie.

During the scene Patrick Stewart and I are shooting that day, Paul Atreides, the character I play, has been in the desert for a couple of years. I had petitioned for my hair to go past my shoulders, Jesus style — a sexier and messiah-like Paul — but was overruled. The final decision is a compromise that serves neither side: hair extensions glued to my scalp with a latex adhesive. Taking them off at the end of each day is a painful process that involves rubbing alcohol and a light scalping that leaves behind stubborn balls of latex in my hair. Currently, I am wearing a white hairnet over my perm, to keep it in place before we shoot. Patrick, mostly bald on top, has longer hair extensions, too, given that his character, Paul’s adviser and friend Gurney Halleck, has been in exile as well. We stare off into the distance, catching our breath, saving our energy.

The first thing I noticed when I met Patrick was his voice. I went to school for three years to learn how to speak onstage, but I’ll never sound like him. Coming from the prestigious Royal Shakespeare Company, Patrick has the most mellifluous tones, regal and elegant. No one can make the line “Behold, as a wild ass in the desert go I forth to my work” sound correct except for him. He is Gurney Halleck, master swordsman and troubadour. And because he’s also Patrick Stewart, he’s suave and debonair about it. When he puts on the Atreides battle jacket or the Fremen stillsuit, it’s like he’s lived in it all his life. He also has the most marvelously shaped head of any human I’ve ever seen, and I tell him so. He gives me a “thank you, I think” kind of look.

Patrick is in his early 40s at the time, but this is only his third film, and he’s a neophyte when it comes to the complicated world of Dune. Because he’s a last-minute replacement — for Aldo Ray, whose struggles with alcoholism have rendered him out of commission — I try to offer assistance. Patrick simply hasn’t had time to soak up the extensive Dune lore I have spent a lifetime accumulating. Still, we are both newcomers to film, so we share a certain awe about the hectic and bizarre world spinning around us.

Patrick is a mix of stately confidence and thoughtful inquiry. He regularly leans over and, sotto voce, asks me questions about what’s going on. Though he presents a very cool and collected mien, he is just trying to figure shit out like me. We connect on our theater background — I did Shakespeare the previous summer — and laugh at the exponential difference between simple theater productions and … whatever this is. The size and scope of the film often leave us speechless, and I feel less alone with him beside me.

On his first day of shooting, he and I took our seats in a half-built “ornithopter,” which is like a giant, multifaceted bee that flies over the desert. We were seated in front of a gigantic blue screen, where the landscape would be matted in later. I could feel Patrick’s nervousness as we prepared to “fly” over the shield wall and the Great Desert of Arrakis. He leaned forward and quietly asked, “Kyle, what are we looking at here?”

I leaned back and spoke in an undertone: “There’s a sandworm down there bigger than a tractor trailer.”

“Aha. And there?” he asked, pointing lower down. “It’s swallowing one of the harvesters.”

“Harvester?” he asked.

“It’s like a large metal factory on wheels.”

“Seems like a risky mission,” he said, a trace of somber gravitas. “Tremendous risk,” I said quietly.

Patrick’s key line in the scene is “The worm is eight minutes away, sire.” After the first take, he had a question. “Pardon, David?”

“YES, PATRICK,” David said in his distinctive honk.

“How exactly would I know how far out the worm is?” I’m impressed that Patrick exists deeply enough within his character to ask such a thing.

David stopped, re-calculating in his mind. “EXCELLENT QUESTION, PATRICK,” he said, like a supportive teacher. “THANK YOU.” He then dispatched a propman to construct a gauge, with analog hands to be inserted later.

Having carried the world of Dune in my head for years, I, too, arrived on set with such inquiries. Carefully and diplomatically, I at first pushed back on some production details. I know the book inside and out — I am likely the only one on set who does — so I feel I carry a responsibility to the story.

When I was fitted for the stillsuit, I felt some things were missing: “How come these suits don’t have hoods?” “Where are the capes?” “Will there be a headpiece?” “Wait, where’s the mouthpiece so you don’t lose moisture when you breathe?”

I wasn’t trying to be difficult; it’s just that I had absorbed the reality of Frank Herbert’s story so completely. If Paul had to survive in that desert climate, in those bleak conditions, with only this protection, he would die. And if being stranded on Dune wasn’t a life-or-death situation, then that would change a whole series of things that affected the characters’ decisions. There was an internal logic that needed to remain intact. My concerns were never about my ego or vanity, but about the truth of that world.

“Kale,” said producer Dino De Laurentiis, still struggling to pronounce my name. “We don’t hire famous actors to cover their faces where no one can see them.”

This did have an unavoidable logic to it. He had plenty to worry about already, and often he and his daughter Raffaella De Laurentiis, also a producer on the film, and David were managing a hundred things at once on a scale I couldn’t even conceive.

After my third degree about the costume, I made a point to choose my battles more carefully.

Still standing around in the broiling desert with Patrick, waiting for the smoke to change direction, we walk over to where Everett McGill is sitting on a chair beneath umbrellas, out of the sun. Everett, who plays Stilgar, a tribal leader of the indigenous “Fremen,” has the calm but commanding presence of an Old West sheriff. He’s got classic movie-star features, a strong jaw and penetrating eyes, but he remains offbeat enough to stay interesting.

“Hey, young buck,” Everett says, his nickname for me. “Surviving?”

I part my hands, like Take a look, making a dramatic flourish of my current state — hairnet, half-removed stillsuit, sweat-drenched T-shirt.

Everett is a different breed of actor, and I’m instantly drawn to him. He’s a taciturn guy who grew up in Kansas, and he has that cowboy feel about him, even down to his badass boots, which I make sure to find a pair of for myself. To protect his vocal cords, he carries a converted soda bottle from which he regularly inhales. It is lined with damp cotton, to hold moisture. He wants Stilgar’s voice to have the deep timbre of a respected elder. Everett is meticulous and thorough, if eccentric, carefully considering all kinds of little details for his character.

Patrick, Everett, and I stare at the thick black smoke coming off the burning tires, the most toxic cloud I’ve ever seen. “You think that’s why we couldn’t shoot this in the States?” I ask, and Patrick and Everett laugh.

Everett seems more sanguine about our current conditions. He’s been around. “This is child’s play,” he says, “compared to what we went through on Quest.”

He has been entertaining us with tales from Quest for Fire, the historical fantasy film directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud that he recently made with Ron Perlman and Rae Dawn Chong. The film had a legendary shoot, nearly a year long: actors sitting for five hours of makeup a day, learning a completely invented language, dealing with the elements in freezing Scotland and blistering Kenya.

“It was grueling,” Everett says, carefully inhaling from his bottle and regaling us like a chieftain before a campfire. He starts enumerating on his fingers. “Ron and I both got frostbite, they had real bears and elephants on set, a volcano eruption we had to plan around, and a set designer got anthrax from animal skins.” He says it all matter-of-factly, a little pride in his resonant voice.

“Jesus,” I say. I glance over at Patrick, and he looks mystified. But as a Hollywood veteran, Everett takes things in stride.

Assuming the Dune pictures will keep me in the space-fantasy business for a while — after all, I had signed an enormous book of a contract for five Dune (and three non-Dune) films for Dino’s company — I listen to his stories in a little bit of awe. I’m excited, even gung ho about clawing my way through those kinds of challenges. The exuberance and stupidity of youth have me embracing the idea of testing myself on a film set. I can’t wait to come back with stories.

“Yeah, we kept it light, though,” Everett says. “You gotta. Or you’d go insane. Ron and I were always pulling shit on each other. One time, I had to traverse this sandhill barefoot where the ground temperature was nearly a hundred fifty degrees. When it was Ron’s turn, I waved him up without saying a word, and boy he nearly killed me. The bottoms of his feet were bright red! Nearly scorched them off!” Everett laughs aloud in his rich tenor. Between him and Patrick, I’m surrounded by the most melodious sounds.

The three of us are becoming fast friends, and though I’m over a decade younger, I feel comfortable with the relaxed camaraderie in the midst of the madness. I’m discovering that friends on a shoot can become a type of family. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers. Everett is playfully envious of my youth — that’s what the whole “young buck” thing is about. “You gotta get out there and graze,” he tells me. “Everything is out there for you. You can go all night, come to set without sleeping.”

I find his words equally inspiring and demoralizing. I’m not great at embracing the moment and a little gun-shy about real-life adventure. But I have always wanted to traverse the country on a motorcycle; for some reason, after time with Everett, I will make a plan to do exactly that when the shoot ends. It goes against all my natural caution, so it is perfect.

Suddenly, the wind shifts. Now the black smoke is blowing right across our faces; it is pure poison, lethal in our throats and lungs, a shock to breathe in. It’s like a neck punch, freezing my vocal cords, stopping me from speaking. Again, not ideal. Everett puts his head down and inhales from his bottle. The rest of us just have to breathe as little as possible.

“OKAY, EVERYONE.” David’s distinctive honk comes through nearby walkie-talkies. “GET IN POSITION, PLEASE.”

Extras spread out across the dunes. Crew members scurry over to the actors with a gardening-type tool, opening the nozzle and blowing a cloud of yellow and red dust onto us. I close my eyes as it covers my hair and face, hold my breath as it gets up my nose and the grit lodges in my teeth.

“BOBBY,” David says over the walkie. “WILL YOU HIT KYLE ONE MORE TIME?”

Someone from wardrobe runs over and shoots me with the dirt gun again for good measure. Now I’m completely covered in it. When I turn around and face the camera, I notice that every single crew member is wearing a nose mask, face covering, and giant black-framed goggles. I have to keep from laughing.

The “dirt” is actually a calcium-based clay called fuller’s earth, a powder that gives images texture and a sense of depth. The effects team has set giant airplane propeller–type fans right off camera. During the shot, they feed fuller’s earth into the fan blades to be blown onto the actors. When I get home that night, I’ll have to rinse out my teeth, spitting red-dirt saliva into the sink. The epitome of Hollywood glamour, just like Cary Grant.

I get into position, the fans blowing dirt and smoke across my face. We spent hours waiting for the wind and then create our own. This is madness. This is Dune.

Paul’s costume includes a “weirding module” attached to his throat; it sticks out like a giant door hinge. In the scene, he and Gurney recognize each other in the desert after years apart, a heartwarming moment. But as he hugs me, Patrick accidentally jabs the module back into my Adam’s apple. I am stunned as my breath and voice stop sharply. My eyes fill with tears from the pain, and I make a slight grunting sound. I don’t speak because I can’t.

The wind shifts again right as we finish, so that’s the take that goes into the film.

Moving on.

Excerpted from FICTIONAL SELVES: A Memoir by Kyle MacLachlan. Copyright © 2026 by Kyle MacLachlan. Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.