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Musk Declares ‘War.’
That’s a perspective shared by Emily Watson, who plays the adult Vayla in the main timeline of Dune: Prophecy, and Olivia Williams, who plays her sister Tula. On Watson’s advice, Williams and her co-star prepared for their roles by “going to look at the Tudor portraits of Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots at the National Portrait Gallery, a couple of sisters who had varying degrees of closeness and separation, as history has shown.”
Indeed, while Watson describes herself as a “Dune virgin” and admits she was first introduced to the world via the Villeneuve films, she finds her way into the world by focusing on the relatable ambiguities of the characters. “For me, it’s a properly complex human story,” Watson tells Den of Geek. The Harkonnens are a “properly messed up family, with a lot of trauma and a lot of messed-up relationships, and then they’ve given themselves to this powerful organization that is trying to control pretty much every aspect of the universe.”
Yes, Watson again makes Valya sound a little villainy, but she also disputes that label. “You never play a villain,” she explains. “You always play a person who thinks they are blessed with the right way of seeing things… Valya is utterly convinced that she alone can see the right way forward for humankind.”
Even those who haven’t read Herbert’s sequel books, Dune Messiah or Children of Dune, or know about the Golden Path followed by Paul and the tyrant Duke Leto II in later books, can see that Watson’s description also refers to the apparent hero of Villeneuve’s first two Dune movies.
The show has two steady guides in showrunner/producer Alison Schapker and executive producer Jordan Goldberg. “Dune: Prophecy was a real opportunity to allow us to explore different worlds and different characters, and that was exciting because anything outside of Arrakis hasn’t really been touched. We were really eager to do that,” Goldberg says.
Schapker, a fan of Herbert’s work since her teens, also got help from Villeneuve himself. That said, she’s quick to point out that Villenueve and Frank Herbert’s son Brian, co-author of Sisterhood of Dune, gave the show their blessing to go in different directions, even as it exists in the same continuity as the movies.
