Keen-eyed viewers may well have noticed during “Dune: Part One” that Jason Momoa’s character, Duncan Idaho, has a particular continuity problem. Throughout the film, his beard seems to become shorter and shorter until it gets to a point where he is almost clean-shaven. It’s something that’s easy to miss the first time you watch the film, but becomes very obvious when you know about it. Director Denis Villeneuve wanted the character to have very little facial hair, although asking Momoa to shave off his beard was seemingly a nerve-racking experience.
Speaking on the Directors UK podcast, Villeneuve explained that the way the movie was filmed meant the actor appeared with different lengths of facial hair. He and the writers attempted to explain this in the film with a scene that mentioned the character shaving. Yet, it was ultimately removed as the humor and tone was out of sync with the rest of the movie. “We wrote the scene, to make jokes about the fact, and it felt so bad, so cheesy, that I decided to remove it,” the director said. “I said, ‘F*** it, we’ll embrace the fact that this character has a beard at the beginning and the end. Then he shaves when he goes in the mission, in the desert,’ and nobody noticed.”
