Back in 2018, when Timothée Chalamet was announced as the star of Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune” series, filming a blockbuster adaptation of one of science fiction’s most complex stories did seem like “a little bit” of a leap, the actor said.
After all, David Lynch’s 1984 attempt hadn’t resonated at the box office, and Villeneuve’s three-part vision would cost hundreds of millions of dollars at a time when some superhero vehicles had struggled to make a profit.
But that little leap has paid off. Together “Dune: Part One” and “Part Two” have grossed more than $1 billion worldwide. That’s especially noteworthy given that the first one arrived in the wake of Covid theater shutdowns and the sequel was delayed by the writers’ strike.
“Part Three,” which is based on the subsequent novels in Frank Herbert’s “Dune” series, arrives in theaters Dec. 18. “The anticipation of this one has been really, really awesome,” Chalamet said in an interview with several castmates.
The third installment jumps ahead nearly 20 years, with Chalamet’s Paul Atreides now an interplanetary emperor under threat and estranged from his former love, Chani (Zendaya), who continues to fight fiercely for her Fremen people. Robert Pattinson joins as a new villain, intent on taking Paul down. He called the series “one of the only franchises where I’m like, ‘oh I’m a full fan.’”
Filmed in Hungary and the deserts of the United Arab Emirates, “Part Three” reunited the stars, castmates like Florence Pugh, Anya Taylor-Joy and Jason Momoa, and crew members, including the same costumer (Lori Harris), Zendaya said. “She’s watched me grow up, and I feel like now she’s an auntie.”
In October, Chalamet, Zendaya, Momoa and Taylor-Joy gathered in a studio space in London to discuss working together, being directed by Villeneuve and why fans of the books shouldn’t be concerned by how “Part Three” diverges from its source material. (Pattinson and Pugh spoke via video call a few weeks later.)
Here are edited excerpts from our conversations.
Zendaya and Timothée, you were both 22 or 23 when you filmed “Part One.” Does it feel like you’ve grown up with these films?
TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET Absolutely. I was thinking about it with Z, usually you grow up with people over your childhood or your adolescence, and it was special with Z to kind of begin working with each other at the end of youth, and at the beginning of adulthood.
ZENDAYA If I look back at the version of us then, it is like a child to me now. Which is a beautiful thing. Because we were all anxious and really coming into it, back then at least, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and wanting to do a good job. I think there’s no better home to have been learning and growing. Because of his kindness and his generosity, Denis is a great leader.
Denis’s kindness is something that people who’ve worked with him talk about a lot.
ANYA TAYLOR-JOY It can’t be understated how magical it is to be in the presence of somebody who leads with love and who commands this enormous ship of people to do this thing, and they’re not doing it because they’re afraid of him.
CHALAMET It’s a really wholesome instinct that everyone has to try to make him satisfied, basically.
FLORENCE PUGH Totally, everyone is teacher’s pet. Oh my God, I am an ultimate teacher’s pet. We certainly wouldn’t follow anybody into battle, but we do with him.
That makes me think of the notoriously tricky desert shoots the “Dune” films require. How were they for you all this time around?
ZENDAYA The hardest thing is to just meditate through the heat. There’s scenes where the sun is so bright that I am trying to give another facial expression other than [Zendaya scrunches up her face as if in pain] and I physically can’t. [Laughs] I was just pouring sweat, trying to focus, keep my eyes open as much as I can.
You’ve got to get ready and set up before the sun starts coming up, while it’s still cool, and also we had to get into the prosthetics of it all. No one earlier than Rob.
ROBERT PATTINSON The desert is just another level. There’s this one sequence where I’m in this spaceship, on a gimbal, on the edge of a sand dune, and we had this 350-foot-long model of a sandworm. The scale of this stuff is just unbelievable, you’re having your own “Dune” theme park, where the gimbal is going upside down and flying, and this is not like work at all. There are no negatives.
Apart from having your sweat drained out of the top of your head, and getting like bulbous sweat bubbles. But even then, I didn’t even really notice them. He’s so easy to work with, Denis, it’s never really a stress.
Anya, you were on set briefly for a cameo in the second film.
TAYLOR-JOY I mean, barely. [Laughs] I was part of a rogue team that went to Namibia, but it was one of my favorite shooting experiences of all time.
Your character Alia, Paul’s sister, is born with knowledge from previous generations of women and is a much bigger part of this movie.
TAYLOR-JOY At the end of the movie, Denis and I talked, and I was like, “Whoa, I’m the bad guy. That’s crazy.”
But I really understood where she was coming from. What a gift of a character to play somebody that has one connection to one person, and nobody else matters at all.
That kind of straightforwardness felt almost animalistic in a way. I’ve never really done animal work before, but she was definitely my most feral creation.
Herbert wrote a sequel to his first “Dune” novel in part because readers in the 1960s hadn’t understood the message of the first novel.
TAYLOR-JOY This has kind of happened with the movies, too. Paul is a very charismatic character and you have to have the third movie to be like, hold up, this is not the moral of the story.
Making the film, how pertinent did Herbert’s intended warning about the dangers of a messianic, totalitarian leader feel?
CHALAMET Well, it definitely feels personal because of how many of these themes have stood the test of time from the ’60s to now, and the scary world we live in.
The more I worked on “Dune,” the less I felt it was my more local responsibility to be thinking about the greater themes at large. That Denis was perfectly handling them, and, especially in this one, thinking what would it actually be like to be in that kind of situation, thinking of world leaders, good and bad, present and past, and how exhausting and diminishing it is to always be making decisions of importance.
PUGH I think we are witnessing a lot of the way that people feel right now through their art, and that hasn’t been lost on me for a long time. For the last 10 years of filmmaking — other than “Barbie,” which was brilliantly upbeat — I feel like we have been feeling that in art.
Jason, your character Duncan Idaho was killed in the first movie. In “Part Three,” you play a character who looks just like Duncan and was created from his genetic material but has none of Duncan’s memories or personality.
JASON MOMOA It’s probably the weirdest character I’ve ever had to navigate, because I know I was hired to play Duncan for a certain reason, then I had to figure out how to play a guy who doesn’t know who the guy is.
I also didn’t have Denis, like I had on the first one. They were already shooting and I came in, and I was not going to call and ask a bunch of questions.
It was very challenging. I’m not the most subtle actor, or human, so it was probably my most subtle performance. I haven’t seen it yet. I don’t know which takes he used.
And another thing too, working with Tim, I have to fight him. [His character Paul] is at a whole other level, and better than me as a fighter. And you know, realistically, how do we put that together?
CHALAMET That was a very polite way of saying that.
[All laugh]
MOMOA He’s a better actor. I’m better at fighting. But he’s really fast. I was super impressed: Just because you’re a great actor, it doesn’t mean that you’re able to dance. Ultimately, it’s a dance.
For those of you who have seen the film already, how was watching the conclusion of these characters’ stories? How different is it from the novel?
ZENDAYA There’s a lot in this film that is very true to the source material, and there are departures.
TAYLOR-JOY Denis is literally the biggest “Dune” fan of all time, so for that to be the person who’s steering the ship, you feel pretty good about it.
PATTINSON You got to be kind of crazy if you’re going to be picking fault with this one.
The script was really cool, but it was quite complicated. And watching the film, it’s not about what I thought it was going to be about at all. It reads as much more of a grand political, moral fable, and the movie is so much more emotional. A lot of it is about parenting, and I just thought it was so moving.
MOMOA Are you satisfied, when you watch the end?
CHALAMET Absolutely. It didn’t feel like the bar dropped at all, Denis just changed the location of the bar. This movie is its own thing.
MOMOA I have butterflies in my belly. I’m going to watch it tonight with my kid [Nakoa-Wolf Momoa, who plays Paul and Chani’s son] and it’s going to be special. That’s his first movie he’s ever been in.
TAYLOR-JOY What a great first movie!
In 2021, when “Part One” came out, Covid had hit and ticket sales were really down. Today, Hollywood is in a very different place, with a recent boom at the box office. How big a part do you think the “Dune” movies have played in this resurgence?
PUGH I think they brought back moviegoing. What an event the second one was. It was just so lovely to be a part of something that we know is our generational kind of “Star Wars.”
CHALAMET Hopefully it’s had a big part in it. I think everyone here has humbly had a big part in it.
ZENDAYA Any opportunity that we have that we can hopefully contribute to the moviegoing experience and keep that alive, because it’s so much a part of my life, my childhood, so many people’s lives — it’s the reason we do it.
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