SPOILER ALERT: This textual content incorporates spoilers for the premiere of “Dune: Prophecy,” titled “The Hidden Hand,“ now streaming on Max.
Eight months after the premiere of the movie “Dune: Half 2,” it’s time to go 10,000 years into the story’s earlier with HBO’s prequel sequence “Dune: Prophecy.”
Given that current is prepared inside the distant earlier, there’s no Timothée Chalamet as Paul Atreides, Austin Butler as Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen or Florence Pugh as Princess Irulan Corrino — nonetheless their family dynasties are successfully represented in “Dune: Prophecy.” The current explains the origins of the Bene Gesserit, the extremely efficient, all-female sect that secretly pulls the political strings of the universe. (Rebecca Ferguson’s Lady Jessica and Lea Seydoux’s Lady Margot are among the many many most well-known Bene Gesserit in Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune” movement footage.) Emily Watson and Olivia Williams star as Valya and Tula Harkonnen, two sisters who lead the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood.
The premiere episode begins with a flashback to the Butlerian Jihad, a battle waged by folks in opposition to all pondering machines that’s considered one of many earliest events chronicled inside the “Dune” novels. The battle worn out (practically) every laptop, House Atreides members had been labeled heroes and the Harkonnens had been villainized and banished. Years later, a youthful Valya Harkonnen is made the chief of the Bene Gesserit after the inaugural Mother Superior Raquella dies. Moments sooner than her lack of life, Raquella has visions of giant sandworms on Arrakis and burning flesh — an omen of what’s to return in 10,000 years.
Now an grownup and the model new Mother Superior, Valya is making able to induct Princess Ynez Corrino (Sarah-Sofie Boussnina) into the Bene Gesserit. Her mom and father are Emperor Javicco Corrino (Mark Strong) and Empress Natalya (Jodhi Might), who’ve Ynez teaching with studly swordmaster Keiran Atreides (Chris Mason). No matter their goo-goo eyes at each other, Ynez is politically betrothed to the prince of House Richese, who appears to be a nine-year-old boy.
Within the meantime, a soldier named Desmond Hart (Travis Fimmel), who survived an assault on Arrakis, arrives and requests an viewers with the Emperor, nonetheless the resident Reverend Mother Kasha (Jihae) is suspicious of him. An identical to Mother Superior Raquella sooner than her, Kasha moreover will get an ominous imaginative and prescient of what’s in retailer for Princess Ynez.
The imaginative and prescient quickly comes true as Ynez’s bridal ceremony to the Richese boy goes off the rails. After he’s married, the little groom pulls out a seemingly harmless robotic lizard, nonetheless the toy is an outlawed laptop that’s been forbidden. The royal guests panic, nonetheless Desmond destroys the machine sooner than it’d set off an extreme quantity of problem. In a stunning twist, nonetheless, Desmond later finds the Richese prince and burns him alive with some type of telepathic fireside powers. The similar future befalls Reverend Mother Kasha, as questions on Desmond’s earlier begin to rise.
Showrunner Alison Schapker and stars Watson and Williams break down the premiere with Choice, discussing their Harkonnen characters and making a “Dune” universe that’s 10,000 years so far.
Courtesy of HBO
How acquainted had been you with the world of “Dune” sooner than signing on for “Prophecy”?
Alison Schapker: My historic previous with “Dune” started, like many people, as a fan and as an adolescent finding out it in my attic mattress room. I’ve a extremely sturdy memory of finding out that e-book. I found it very mind-blowing and affecting, after which I went on with my life and career, and I’ve been writing various science fiction. When it was inside the ether that “Dune” was coming to television as a sequence, and that I’d not directly be involved in it, it was solely a precise no-brainer. It felt like a dream I didn’t know I had, because of you’ll be capable to’t take into consideration one factor like that coming your technique.
Emily Watson: I’d seen the first “Dune” movie, nonetheless that was it. Nevertheless it was a surprising issue to leap into. There’s rather a lot to wrap your head spherical, rather a lot lore of the world however as well as precise, down and dirty human habits.
Olivia Williams: I had a hotline to Alison, and acknowledged, “I need your most thorough and swiftest crash course.” And he or she, fortunately, wrote the information. We sat and she or he went by way of stage by stage what I wished to know. The one who received right here to place in my audio-visual in my house, after I knowledgeable him I was paying Tula Harkonnen, he knelt at my ft. At the moment, I knew that I wanted to take this considerably. A lot of folks’s hopes and needs had been at my behest, and I wished to respect that.
You possibly can have Denis Villeneuve’s movement footage as a reference of what the long term seems to be like like, nonetheless how was creating the world 10,000 years so far?
Schapker: It’s an immense amount of world developing. Nothing exists in our world, so that you just’re imagining all of the issues. What does that hat seem to be or that swimsuit or that delicate? To me, filmmaking is so many little decisions, and I try to do each one with care and let the imaginative and prescient accumulate. We went to new planets that we’ve not at all been on sooner than. We went to an icy planet, so what do of us robe like there, what’s the commerce, the place do they keep, how does it actually really feel acquainted and precise to us however as well as unfamiliar?
Williams: Most importantly, there’s no sand. Ours is a extremely damp planet with various moss, and there was an individual with a with a tank full of water on his once more, spraying us down at every various.
Watson: We title it 10,000 years B.C. — Sooner than Chalamet.
The Harkonnens from the flicks are all pale, bald villains, nonetheless how are Valya and Tula portrayed in any other case in “Prophecy”? What’s their relationship like with the Atreides family?
Watson: The title Atreides makes us wince because of they’ve, based mostly totally on a lie, ruined our recognition and our fortunes. That’s how I’m telling it. Throughout the “Dune” universe, there’s nothing truly that accurately qualifies practically pretty much as good or unhealthy. We predict we’re wonderful. Not all folks would agree.
Williams: Within the occasion you look once more at any battle over land and power and family feuds, the place does it start? The science fiction inside the 60s has this honorable customized of reflecting what you see in precise politics now. Who was there first? Who owns this land? Whose family spat on whose goat first? It’s human nature in irrespective of period, 10,000 or 20,000 years from now. Sadly, of us don’t neglect.
One in every of many alternative components that’s eerily associated to our world at the moment is the place of experience and AI. Did you depend on that it is going to be that prescient whilst you had been making the current?
Schapker: It’s a extremely trippy experience to be working in a “Dune” universe that imagines the fallout of artificial intelligence and the worth that individuals paid — and the great worth to the species to current their pondering over and outsource that. It imagines a worst-case state of affairs the place the factitious intelligence finally subjugates of us and requires an infinite battle that almost pushes of us to the brink of extinction. The suspicions, fears and worth of what that experience would possibly carry, you’re inside the fallout of my creative world after which within the true world, I stroll spherical and I see of us utterly giving over their pondering. What happens within the occasion you don’t have a machine? We’re gonna do this; I imagine we’re merely going to see that. I don’t know that it’s stoppable, so it does actually really feel want it’s a wonderful time to be asking questions. This current would help you formulate some questions spherical experience.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
