When Christopher Walken was first cast in Dune: Part Two as his Imperial Majesty, the Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV, 81st of his line and supreme ruler of the known universe, admirers of Denis Villeneuve’s first film and author Frank Herbert’s original science fiction novel naturally expected  a grandiloquent appearance to match the ornate title. Instead, Villeneuve delivered a pared down presentation of the interplanetary authoritarian, who is adorned in relatively simple gray cloaks. Rare textures and intricate weaving were present in the lines of the 80-year-old actor’s face. The jewels could be found in his icy stare.

Truly intimidating power, Walken says, doesn’t have to announce itself. That’s his explanation for why the long-ruling emperor doesn’t feel obliged to dazzle with his appearance. “There is something about getting older that you’re sort of not inclined to get out of your pajamas,” he tells Vanity Fair. “He maybe doesn’t take a shower as often as he should. There’s a little bit of ‘the hell with it’ at a certain point.”

Walken’s list of credits is as impressive as any of Shaddam IV’s royal epithets. Among them are The Deer Hunter (1978), which won him the supporting actor Academy Award; The Dead Zone and Brainstorm (both 1983), A View to a Kill (1985), King of New York (1990), True Romance (1993), Pulp Fiction (1994), and Catch Me If You Can (2002), which earned him another Oscar nomination. His filmography is significantly longer than that, but Walken isn’t adding as many titles to the list anymore. For decades, he tended to appear in multiple movies each year, taking both large and small parts, but Dune: Part Two marks his first screen role in four years.

Why did he decide to make this film his comeback? “I had, of course, seen the first Dune a number of times. I loved it, and I admired [Villeneuve’s] movies. Arrival, I thought, was wonderful,” Walken says. “And to be with all those terrific actors —Javier Bardem and Josh Brolin, Timothée Chalamet, Florence Pugh, and Stellan Skarsgård—and to go to Budapest, which is a beautiful city. And of course, that’s what I do for a living. It was only, I think, three weeks. So, everything about it was attractive.”

News of Walken’s casting sent movie websites into a frenzy of speculation. Many paired his photograph alongside concept images of ceremonial outfits and headdresses devised for Chilean-French filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky’s abandoned Dune adaptation in the 1970s, which hoped to cast the surrealist artist Salvador Dalí as the emperor and envisioned him as a kind of cosmic Christmas tree. Other film sites suggested his eventual appearance in Dune: Part Two by posting images of Walken wearing a bejeweled turban from 1992’s Batman Returns, or dressed in the silken robes of his flamboyant villain from the 2007 ping-pong comedy Balls of Fury. Needless to say, Villeneuve had no intention of putting Walken with that type of over-the-top finery.

None of that will help a humble earthling get into the mindset of a galactic overlord. “I can tell you that it’s probably better not to think about it,” Walken says. “When I was young, I had to play a king in something. I was in a Shakespeare play. It was Henry II. And an older actor said to me, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ He said, ‘If the director sets it up so that people treat you like the king, you don’t have to do much.’ And I sort of trusted that to happen.”

The show of power and wealth is all around Shaddam IV, so Villeneuve and Walken believed it didn’t have to be piled on top of him as well. “The emperor’s got the trappings, he’s got the court, he’s got the costume, he’s got the bodyguards. And so I figured I’d just let them call me the emperor,” Walken says.

This withholding approach to the intimidating power broker is actually foreshadowed in another iconic Walken performance, in which he delivered an intimidating speech about a lion who reigns as “king of the jungle,” but tolerates the other animals nipping at him, taking food from his domain, and encroaching on his territory—“until one day…that lion gets up and tears the shit out of everybody.”

“Oh,  Poolhall Junkies…” Walken says. “I think you’re right. They call it ‘poking the bear with a stick,’ and yeah, that’s true. He’s the lion in winter. [The emperor] can’t quite do what he used to, but he’s still dangerous.”

The tragic events of the first Dune film in which Chalamet’s father, Duke Leto Atreides (played by Oscar Isaac), is set up for destruction over control of a precious desert planet, was entirely engineered by the emperor because he feared the duke’s rising popularity. In Dune: Part Two, that bloody decision comes back on him. Chalamet’s Paul Atreides is the lion now.

The other element that contributes to Shaddam IV’s feral presence is Walken’s own fearsome onscreen history. Moviegoers have such a long relationship with him that the memories of his litany of sinister, ruthless, and haunted characters serve as a shorthand. “I think that people don’t mention often enough that when an actor shows up on screen, they’re not only playing the part they’re playing, but they’re carrying all the stuff that you’ve seen before,” Walken says. “That’s part of it. I think that that always has to be taken into consideration.”

Part of that unspoken language in Dune: Part Two is a galactic role that Walken didn’t get to play. The Dune novels were a clear inspiration for George Lucas’s Star Wars saga (desert worlds, messianic young heroes, man-machines, and evil emperors, plus the ability to control people’s minds with words). Back in 1975, a 32-year-old Walken was up for one of that film’s main roles.

“I think it was for Han Solo,” Walken says. “Yes, I auditioned for it. And if I’m not mistaken, my partner in the audition was—I think this is true—it was Jodie Foster.”

His would-be Han Solo moment with Foster’s Princess Leia was fleeting. “I think we did a screen test. I’m not sure we did a scene. Maybe we just sat in front of, in those days, those old videotape cameras,” Walken recalls. “We might have just sat there and did the name, rank, and serial number type of thing. I would say that, Yes, I did audition for Star Wars, but so did about 500 other actors. It was lots of people doing that.”

Walken has no regrets. He landed another role around that time—in a movie that would win the Oscar best picture over Star Wars—playing Diane Keaton’s disturbingly self-destructive brother in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall. The very next year, he won an Oscar himself for his harrowing performance as a shattered soldier The Deer Hunter.

“I mean, I auditioned for Love Story, for Star Wars. But it’s probably just as well that I didn’t get either one of them,” Walken says. His own empire remains secure. No additional ornamentation necessary.