[Editor’s note: The following interview contains spoilers for Season 1 of “Dune: Prophecy.”]
It wasn’t enough for Legendary Entertainment and Warner Bros. to mount three big-budget spectacles directed by Denis Villeneuve based on Frank Herbert’s classic “Dune” series. (The first two were blockbusters grossing $1.1 billion worldwide. The third, “Dune: Messiah,” also starring Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Javier Bardem, and Rebecca Ferguson, is due December 25, 2026.) The studios also teamed up with HBO to produce the TV series “Dune: Prophecy.”
Executive produced by Diane Ademu-John and showrunner Alison Schapker, the show also takes place on a massive scale. The veteran who carries the six-episode series (which starts production on a second season this summer) is Emily Watson, a British character actress who broke out back in 1997 with a Best Actress Oscar nomination for Lars von Trier’s “Breaking the Waves.”
With 28 years of rich work behind her since then (Oscar-nominated “Hilary and Jackie,” BAFTA-nominated “Angela’s Ashes”), Watson emerges in a powerful role as Valya Harkonnen, the ruthless, driving Mother Superior of the Sisterhood, an early precursor to the mighty Bene Gesserit. She and her black-veiled minions run the universe, wielding their dark arts behind the scenes. “Dune: Prophecy” is loosely based on Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson’s “Great Schools of Dune” trilogy (2012–2016), which is set 10,000 years before the events of “Dune.” We talked at New York’s Park Lane Hotel.
The following interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
IndieWire: The series is beautifully mounted, on every level. It’s thought-out. It’s smart.
Emily Watson: Yes, and we’ve got every chance of it heading in a smart direction, because with Series 1, we had a bit of strike on us. We got a lot of movement, things going quite crazy, shifting personnel.
You had started with your “Chernobyl” director Johan Renck, who left over creative differences. Anna Foerster directed the first two episodes instead. That was a bit of a wrench?
There was a lot of shifting ground. When I signed up with Johan, he’s a singular character, quite an amazing guy. He had quite a Lynchian vision. And the studio obviously wanted it to belong to this current universe more. It ended up being a false start. And then it was getting ducks in a row. It went before it was ready. But they figured out the DNA of what they wanted and how they wanted it. And then we had the strike. Now I feel Alison [ Schapker]’s in the driving seat and she’s been confirmed as [successful]. I’m excited to get my teeth into [Season Two].
When do you start?
It’s mid to end of August, for me. I’ll start heading back to Bucharest.
So you and Olivia Williams as your sister Tula Harkonnen anchor the story. She was at the Royal Shakespeare Company with you. Were you friends?
We were. I’ve known Olivia — my husband was at Cambridge with her. So that’s like, 25 years ago?
I feel like I came up with you. I was at Cannes for “Breaking the Waves,” and such Miramax 90s movies such as “Hilary and Jackie.”
We survived, right?
That was the indie period. You describe yourself as an indie film person.
That was a real heyday, wasn’t it? It was a strange time. You had to figure out what it all was, and what it meant, and how you could put your way through it.
But it was treacherous for women. Actresses especially. Did you learn ways to fend people off and keep yourself safe, rules that you played by?
I was lucky, because I started with “Breaking the Waves.” I was with the role model, Stellan Skarsgård, as my partner in crime. It was a creatively exposing and scary experience.
You were exposed at Cannes without your director Lars von Trier, who was afraid to fly.
So he didn’t come. I didn’t know what Cannes meant. I had no knowledge of the film world or anything. It was a baptism of fire. They sent me to Dior to put me in a dress, like a chintz sofa that was very of the period.
Do you admire Trier?
I love that he exists, that he’s changed the map, that he’s done what he’s done, and, he’s been controversial. Other actresses have had not comfortable experiences with him, but that wasn’t my experience. But just in the way that he’s envisaged what a film is, I didn’t know it at the time, but he was changing things.
You figured out some things on that movie about film acting?
I guess I did, because of the way we shot it. There were no setups. We just filmed. We just did the scene over and over again, and the camera was like a character in the scene going around and looking at us. So there wasn’t any sense of intrusion of the technical world. We were just in it. It was very immersive. And you learn very quickly.
“Dune: Prophecy” was series television. It must have been challenging for you to carry it.
It took some persuading to get me to do it.
What was your worry? You had just acted in “Chernobyl.”
I’ve never done anything that’s a returning [to a franchise]. I’ve done television before, obviously. She was an exhausting character to play. She was tough and hard. And my natural screen presence is generally empathetic and receptive, and she’s not. I had to reach for it a bit. Once I’d found it, then she was there. But it was also leading a team of young actors and actresses, a lot of them were quite inexperienced, just trying to teach people how to survive: “This is how precise and concentrated and in it you have to be to survive the fact that you’ll only have a couple of takes, maybe, and it’ll all go by in a whirlwind, and it’s not going to be what you think it’s going to be, because they’ve got to do that, and they’ve got to do that, and they’ve got to do that.” Helping people still feel like they’re doing something meaningful and real, and creating a sense of a company.
I got a kick out of Valya. She’s ruthless and powerful. Did part of you enjoy that?
It was interesting for me, playing a character like that, because I grew up in a religious, weird cultist situation [The School of Economic Science]. I have experience of charismatic leaders and how they recruit people, how they tell young people that they’re special, they’re chosen, and this is the path. That is her story. She’s lost, she’s vulnerable. She’s powerful, talented in the sense that the currency of that universe is mental prowess and acuity, and she’s got that in spades. And the leader picks her out and says, “You’re the one. You’re going to help me change the universe.” And that’s how the momentum of those things gather, because those people think they’re special in a way that the end of justifies the means. It’s the building of a cult, which becomes in 10,000 years in the Paul Atreides universe, the Bene Gesserit.
What does she think her mission is? What is driving her?
She’s using eugenics to pair the right humans, so that the right leader, who is going to save humankind, will set them on the right path of peace and justice and prosperity and goodness. We will make that happen by controlling. But to support that work, we have the sisterhood and all the truthsayers, who are able to discern truth from lies and keep everybody making good decisions. But we also have a very sophisticated network of spies and underhand methods of manipulating people so that we make ripples that make people think that they’re in control of events, but in fact, we are manipulating people’s reactions so that things happen.
You learned something about what a powerful despot can be. It’s timely, right now. You’re watching it play out in the real world.
Frank Herbert wrote these books back in the ’60s, but these things don’t go away. It’s a cycle. The sisterhood, on the surface, they discern truth. But in fact, they manipulate it. They control it. They create the myth. They create the circumstances when what they want is favored. In the current age, there’s a need to look at that.
This series reminds me of “Wolf Hall.” It’s royal intrigue!
When Olivia was cast, I said, “We’re going to go to the National Portrait Gallery in London and we’re going to look at all those women, Elizabeth I and all the Mary’s, all the people who lived in that totalitarian fear-driven place.” Those corridors of power were so paranoid.
What’s coming in Season 2?
Next time, you’re going over to Arrakis. During the [Season 1] finale I go into what happened to Desmond [“Vikings” star Travis Fimmel]. He’s had a thinking machine put into his eye. I know that somebody is manipulating him, and somebody deliberately set us up.
He is reunited with his mother, Tula. What is the fear virus?
In the finale, I get him to deliberately infect me. He could look at you, and then later, you’d start burning. The fear virus works through fear. You inflame it, and then it takes over your body chemistry and burns you from the inside.
Actresses often complain a lot about about the roles that they are offered, but you’ve had a good run.
I’ve been lucky that I’ve been on the right side of that change. I’m a character actor; that liberates me from a certain trajectory. It has changed with the advent of streaming. Fifty percent of the audience are women. And the direction is no longer being dictated this man, this man, this man, this man, this man. There are five people who can make a bankable movie in Hollywood. It’s not the same for television. But it’s been the mentality for a long time that you have to have a bankable male lead, and that has changed because it’s you and me sitting in the living room with the buttons going: “That’s boring. I don’t want to watch this.”
You have coming up Chloe Zhao’s “Hamnet,” based on Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 bestseller.
I’m playing Mary Arden, mother of Shakespeare, who is a typical woman of her day trying to survive, married to a man who is a drinker. She encounters this young woman, Shakespeare’s wife Chloe [Jessie Buckley], who is magical, witchy, connected. She can tell things about people by holding their hand. It’s about the death of Hamnet, their eldest. They had a pair of twins, but Hannah died when he was 11, and it’s a story about giving birth and losing children and the women around that.
