Earlier this year, Denis Villeneuve released the masterpiece Dune: Part Two and blew us all away with his stunning vision of the desert planet Arrakis, the sandworms that live there, and the rise of unwilling space messiah Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet). But that's not the only Dune thing that'll be coming to our screens this year. Believe it or not, we're but a few short months away from the release of Dune: Prophecy, a brand new spinoff series coming to Max.
Dune: Prophecy is set 10,000 years before the Dune story covered in Denis Villeneuve's movies, which adapt the seminal 1965 novel by Frank Herbert. This new series is all about the founding of the Bene Gesserit sisterhood of space witches, who manipulate the levers of power in the galaxy from the shadows. By Paul's time, they're one of the most powerful factions around. But in Dune: Prophecy, they're just beginning to find their footing.
“We get to see how it all started,” showrunner Alison Schapker told Entertainment Weekly during the first in-depth interview about Dune: Prophecy. “When we meet Valya Harkonnen, she is a girl whose family has experienced a tremendous fall from power and has lost its noble status. She dreams of restoring what she feels is rightfully theirs. How she goes from being someone obsessed with rebuilding her noble house to being someone who is dedicated to the Sisterhood above all is a big part of the story. It’s not a girlhood coming-of-age narrative so much as a woman's rise to power from a Harkonnen perspective.”
Meet the Harknnonen sisters
In Paul's time, the Harkonnens are one of the strongest and most reviled houses in the known universe thanks to their brutal methods which have gained them a monopoly on the spice of Arrakis. But back in the days of Dune: Prophecy, they're much lower on the totem pole and considered cowards after an intergalactic war restructured the balance of power.
The two main players we'll follow from House Harkonnen are Valya and Tula Harkonnen, played by Emily Watson and Olivia Williams, respectively. These two celebrated English actors have known each other for years, but this is the first time they've ever worked together on screen. It's also the first time Watson will be stepping into a dense sci-fi world like Dune.
“I've never really done anything like this before,” Watson said. “Most of the work I've done so far in my career has been very much based in reality. Getting my head around all the Dune lore and language was a new thing for me. But within that, I found really rich acting territory. It’s quite complex, and it’s a really fun world to play in.”
“Our careers have run in absolute parallel,” Williams added. “I was at the Royal Shakespeare Company at the same time she was, so we met in the garden of a pub called The Dirty Duck in Stratford-upon-Avon. I think the next time we met was in the parking lot of the Four Seasons in Los Angeles, when she was Oscar-nominated for Breaking the Waves and I was having an amazing period when I made The Postman, Rushmore, and The Sixth Sense in quick succession in the late ‘90s. We’ve bounced in and out of each other's lives, so this was a very exciting opportunity that felt fateful.”
It does feel fateful that these two actors who've known each other are now coming together in Dune: Prophecy, where their characters will build the Bene Gesserit into the sort of force we know from the main Dune movies. After all, the Bene Gesserit do love a good long-game plot that puts people into positions that most benefit them.
Despite being a Dune prequel series, don't expect Prophecy to take place on Arrakis. The Dune universe is much wider than that, and Prophecy is going to explore some locations we've never seen before.
“Everyone I know who’s seen the movies kept asking me, ‘Oh wow, were you in these incredibly hot countries?’ I was like, 'No no no. Our planet is damp and wet,'” Williams explained. “There was a guy with a water tank on, and he'd pump it and spray everything with water. I basically developed webbed feet by the end of filming this show. But the sets were breathtaking. In particular, the central hall of the Bene Gesserit convent was a modern church built in the ‘70s that had been abandoned in this Hungarian woodland. When you walked onto that set, it took your breath away.”
Dune: Prophecy is set 30 years after Sisterhood of Dune
Perhaps the most interesting thing to come out of EW's Dune: Prophecy interviews is the fact that this series will tell a completely new story not based strictly on any of the books. Herbert wrote six Dune books, and his son Brian Herbert and co-author Kevin J. Anderson have written plenty more. It's been known for a while now that Dune: Prophecy would be based on Anderson and Brian Herbert's novel Sisterhood of Dune, which similarly details the rise of the Bene Gesserit. But that's not exactly the case; Dune: Prophecy is a sequel to Sisterhood of Dune which takes place 30 years later.
“I really believe that we found the best of both worlds when it comes to adaptation,” Schapker said. “Sisterhood of Dune was our seminal text that we were working with and drawing inspiration from. Our story is tethered to the events in that book, but we also are telling a story that takes place 30 years after the events of the book. So we have both the book to draw from, but we also have room to develop our characters and tell the story of Valya Harkonnen across multiple timelines.”
This gives Dune: Prophecy a lot more freedom than most adaptations. It can pull important events from Sisterhood of Dune, but still has to create its own story and characters for this new time period. And the fact that it will follow Valya's journey "across multiple timelines" is also very interesting. EW speculates that since the word prophecy is in the title, and since the Bene Gesserit are known to love a good foretelling, we may see not only Valya's past but also future events. I wouldn't rule it out.
There are plenty of other notable names on the Dune: Prophecy cast beside Williams and Watson, including Mark Strong as Emperor Javicco Corrino, Jodhi May as Empress Natalya Arat, Travis Fimmel as Desmond Hart, Chris Mason as Keiran Atreides, Josh Heuston as Constantine Corrino, and Sarah-Sofie Boussnina as Princess Ynez Corrino. It's going to be fascinating to see some of these houses like the Corrinos and Atreides in a very different era than the one we know from Dune.
Dune: Prophecy premieres this November on Max.
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