Emily Watson’s ‘Dune: Prophecy’ Plans Are Falling Apart—or Are They?

With its fourth episode, “Twice Born,” Dune: Prophecy is finally taking shape as layers of history and prophetic scheming converge in dramatic fashion.

The power struggle between the enigmatic Sisterhood (also known as the Bene Gesserit in the Dune movies) and the mysterious, powerful stranger Desmond Hart (Travis Fimmel) is coming to a head. At the center of it all is Emily Watson’s Valya Harkonnen, who leads the Sisterhood as Mother Superior. In the first half of Dune: Prophecy, the HBO series’ dramatic heft has lied in showing just how far Valya will go (and has gone, in flashbacks that star Jessica Barden as young Valya) to realize her plans of a genetic dynasty.

There’s a lot of knotty sci-fi lore in this tale, but as Watson would like to remind us, the Dune: Prophecy plot is also extremely familiar—the sort of thing monarchs and the aristocracy have done throughout our real-world history. “You don’t have to look far to find charismatic leaders who believe in subjugation and destruction in pursuit of their cause,” Watson says.

Valya’s cause just happens to be a grand eugenics program that should lead to Timothée Chalamet’s Paul Atreides 10,000 years down the line, if everything goes her way. Or doesn’t. Prophecies are funny business.

Vanity Fair: You’ve said before that you weren’t really familiar with Dune prior to your work on Dune: Prophecy. How do you feel about the series now?

Emily Watson: I’d seen the first [Denis] Villeneuve movie, which I loved, and I loved the acting in it, the whole world of it. I’m quite glad that I didn’t know how vast the whole universe was, but also the sense of ownership that there is of it, you know? People have very strong visions of what it is and how everything works. We had to go on a very steep learning curve. But in a way, it’s basic building blocks of storytelling that you get anywhere. It’s character and ambition and family and politics.

So at this point in the show, lots of bad things are going down for Valya.

Yes. What I love—as an acting thing for me—in episode four everything she does is so strategic. She returns to her family in order to gain access, to be the savior, to change perception. And she’s outwitted!

But it all becomes very complicated for her, because returning to the fold of [the Harkonnen] family—that kind of rage that she can’t control, it’s very triggering. She has to take her uncle out of play because he’s trying to mess everything up, and he’s getting into people’s ear. But somewhere deep down, it’s also satisfying, the taking of life. And utterly connected to the moment her brother died. That was when her heart froze and she tried to stop herself from being human.

Valya is also a nexus of so much Dune history. Years before her, there’s the Machine War that reversed the fortunes of the Harkonnen and Atreides families, and these cascading personal tragedies that ripple outward—her brother dying, and then her killing Dorotea in the show’s prologue. What’s it like dramatizing all that history, so to speak?

In a way, it’s like she is so far in it, you know? If you start to unpack the logic of what you’re doing, then everything falls apart. So she has to be utterly convinced that what they are doing is for the good of all mankind. She doesn’t care about her own virtue or her own humanity; that’s nothing compared to the cause. She doesn’t need to be liked. She doesn’t need to be loved. If you could bottle that power that is wired into people when they’re very young—people with sort of psychopathic tendencies—you could, you know, say goodbye to nuclear fission! We’d be set there!

Related to that, a fun thing about this show is that you get to see another actor, Jessica Barden, play your character at a different part of

Valya’s life.

I love that. That untamed sense of fierceness Jessica has is so brilliant. To me, a really seminal moment is when she’s in the rain and she can’t go back in, and Mother Raquella recruits her. That moment when a charismatic leader says, “You are very, very special, and you are very powerful and you are incredibly talented. Join me. Together we are going to do great things.”

That’s the oldest recruiting tool in the book. Valya does it to other people as well. But it’s a very dangerous thing to do to a young person, I think, because it gives them a kind of messianic belief in the path, you know? I find it fascinating.

Valya’s story also extends 10,000 years in the future. The work she does here leads to the events of Dune. She kind of wins, in the end, right?

I don’t want to give anything away, but people think that they’re controlling things, and in fact, the prophecy is self-fulfilling.

Right.

That’s way too dramatic! But it’s very interesting, you know? Did they jump, or were they pushed? Who knows what happens in 10,000 years, but it’s the idea that it’s like a religion. They plant these myths, these ideas, and it becomes a religion. And it’s all bullocks.

How do you embrace that aspect of Valya’s story and the Sisterhood’s origin?

You don’t have to look far to find charismatic leaders who believe in subjugation and destruction in pursuit of their cause. It’s often as much about land as it is about religion. Religion is kind of a hook to hang it on. I think that sort of messianic recruitment and that sense of power — building a school around yourself, of young people who all look up to you and don’t question you — I grew up in a quasi-religious situation, which was nothing like this, but had elements of that kind of structure to it. That sense of youth taking things incredibly seriously and being very pure in their intent about things. It’s like fuel for the machine.

Which is interesting, because the ultimate goal for Valya and the Sisterhood is really weird! This breeding program!

Yeah. Eugenics!

I mean, we start off a series marrying a nine-year-old boy to a woman in her 20s! Go figure. It’s appalling. But it is, through history, how nations have made alliances and power has been [preserved]. It’s usually some 12-year-old girl being married off. A lot of the history of this country, England, has been determined by those kinds of alliances.

It’s a hell of a tone-setter, right? We’re starting with regular eugenics, and then our methods escalate to—

Computer-generated eugenics! That sort of determines who’s going to be the chosen one.

But that later down, the series has an incredible payoff. I’m not going to spoil it for you, but it does!