Hey, Dune fans, remember Baron Harkonnen in David Lynch's film? Those orange-sized (well, golfball-sized) boils on his face and the black fluid he sucked out of that waifish slave's chest, and how he bathed in blood? Remember the doctor that drained his boils with that hookah-like tool ("turn it round real neat")?

Perhaps needless to say, a lot of Dune-aholics felt like Lynch's vision just wasn't right. Ian McNeice, the actor playing Baron Harkonnen in the new Frank Herbert's Dune miniseries -- airing on the SCI FI Channel December 3, 4 and 5 -- told SPACE.com he agreed.

"Lynch adapted the book to his vision," said McNeice, who also appeared in No Escape and Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls. "This [miniseries] is in total line with the book."

"They've been washing me down," he said. "And I'm in the most outrageous costume, wearing chains and leather. I'm a big boy so it's pretty grotesque."

After this sight, the Baron floats out of the Jacuzzi to speak with Feyd and Rabban, McNeice said. "It's an extraordinary image."

"The space program is an amazing thing. I love space. I love the thoughtthat one day you might be able to go up as an individual - that the day is coming where we can travel to the moon likegoing from New York to L.A."
     

Ah, the floating. McNeice said as soon as he realized the Baron has to float all the time, he e-mailed director John Harrison about how they were going to do that effect.

"He didn't want to tell me," McNeice said. "So when I got there I found this extraordinary contraption, which was a camera crane with a bicycle seat."

Or at least it looked "extraordinary" at first. McNeice said he had to sit in the "very painful" seat in virtually every shot. Here's how bad it was: the seat put him in the hospital once and was such a hassle for a grip named George to operate that McNeice bought him eight cases of his favorite beer at the end of the shoot.

"It became the Creature of the Black Lagoon," he said. "Every day everyone said, 'Oh, no, Ian's got to get strapped in again!'"

But besides learning to deal with huge amounts of pain, how else did McNeice prepare to play Vladimir Harkonnen? He said his extensive classical training meshed with Harrison's vision.

"Harrison wrote rhyming couplets at the end of some scenes," he said, adding that he found a little Richard III in the Baron. And, like Shakespeare's hunchback villain, McNeice said he wanted the Baron to be more than just pure evil.

"He's a hedonist, a glutton. He has many appetites and he takes what he can get," he said, adding that he tried to punch the Baron's humor whenever he could. In the scene where Leto (William Hurt) almost kills the Baron with the poison tooth, McNeice had to deliver a "three-and-a-half page tirade."

"If I took it all at one pitch, the audience would get bored," he said. "I had to interlace it with little sides of humor."

McNeice found more dark laughs in a great scene omitted from Lynch's film that made it into Harrison's -- Feyd's attempt on the Baron's life.

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"The scene begins with the Baron on the bed with a young boy, and it looks like they've had a party," he said. "Feyd enters and the Baron just lifts his arm."

McNeice also had some great thoughts about mélange, the famed spice to which everyone who's anyone is addicted in Herbert's universe.

"It's like the elixir of life, like cocaine times 53," he said. "It's the biggest buzz you can have. It gives you appetites you never dreamed of. It gives you the will to conquer."