Dune: Prophecy’s showrunner wants you to think beyond the hero / villain binary

Denis Villeneuve’s Dune films become much more disturbing once you start to consider exactly what makes the Bene Gesserit one of the most formidable forces in the Imperium. The Sisterhood’s secrecy and cultivation of strange powers are part of why those outside of the order see Reverend Mothers as almost superhuman beings. But their true power comes from memory and a deep understanding of how every single Bene Gesserit is part of a narrative that’s larger than any one individual.

Though House Atreides is not the centerpiece of Dune: Prophecy, the HBO series’ deep dive into the Bene Gesserit’s history is very much an exploration of the Kwisatz Haderach’s origins. In Valya (Emily Watson) and Tula Harkonnen (Olivia Williams), you can see flashes of the Machiavellian villainy their distant descendants are known for. The most fascinating part of the show so far, though, has been the way it demystifies the Bene Gesserit and presents them as exacting women (rather than witches) trying to save humanity from itself. 

Showrunner Alison Schapker knew that introducing audiences to this new, far-flung period of Dune history would be challenging. The films established such a distinct status quo that the show’s focus on two Harkonnen sisters might leave viewers unclear about who or what they’re rooting for. But when I recently sat down with Schapker to discuss the series’ progression so far, she explained that the more time she spent thinking about how Dune has always been a rumination on the way evolution reshapes reality, the more the Harkonnens felt like the perfect characters to lead Prophecy’s story.

This interview contains spoilers about Dune: Prophecy’s first three episodes and has been edited for length and clarity.

There are so many moving parts at work in Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson’s novel Sisterhood of Dune. Which in particular did you find yourself wanting to dig into with Prophecy?

Valya’s really a founder of the Bene Gesserit order, and this story is unfolding at a time when the organization is still young, fragile, and trying to solidify its hold not just on power but also on its own mission. The Sisterhood is trying to pass these difficult skills to their students while also working to grow their ranks, but there’s also a philosophical schism within the order when we find it, and Valya becomes the choice to lead. But then you have the question of why. Why her? Why a Harkonnen, and what is it about the Harkonnen family that makes them more complicated than we thought? 

If you just know the Harkonnens from the movies, they’re these monstrous villains who are very clearly the bad guys. But that’s not where they started off, and this kind of story gave us a chance to complicate that understanding and dig into what made them that way. I wanted to show some of that evolution as the Harkonnens become the villains we know them as, but it was also exciting to play with the idea of how some of those seeds of Harkonnen-ness were present from the very beginning.

What kind of presence did you want Valya and Tula to be throughout the show as it shifts between timelines?

With Valya, it’s an energy that’s rooted in the novels in the sense that this is an ambitious woman who feels like she’s destined to play a greater role in history, but also that her life’s trajectory has been shaped by a lie. Her dreams are so big, but her family has been banished to this small whaling village on an ice planet because of a history she doesn’t even agree with. 

It was important for our Valya to have to have a really pronounced fierceness of will because that energy is something the Sisterhood sees and cultivates in her in order to make her into the woman they need to meet a desperate moment. But we also wanted to present that willfulness in a way that leaves you uncertain about her as a person. Valya’s desire to guide the Imperium to a better place is real, and there is a genuine nobility to her purpose. But all of that is complicated by her feelings about her family, and we really wanted to explore how that mix of emotions takes her to a place that gets very, very dark.

For Tula, we wanted to really ask ourselves what it means for a younger sibling who has always felt overlooked and invalidated to really come into their own subtly. Valya comes at you head-on and is someone who sucks up the oxygen in the room in a way that’s charismatic. But Tula’s a wild card who you don’t always see coming; she’s the sneaky type who comes at you sideways, and I think that difference makes for such an interesting sibling dynamic. Tula exists in her sister’s shadow, but in times of crisis, we really see the degree to which grappling with this same family drama has made her Valya’s sister in these surprising, powerful ways that aren’t obvious at first.

Do you see Valya as a villain?

I don’t think of her as a villain in an uncomplicated way, but that doesn’t mean I’m always aligned with what she’s doing at any given time. I think she feels very compelled to protect the Sisterhood at all costs, and in her mind, that’s often for the good of everyone. There’s a lot to be debated about the Bene Gesserit’s plans and how they want to shape the future over generations. But at least some of that is their trying to guard against a greater, more devastating tragedy down the line by doing things that, in the moment, might be looked at as evil or criminal. 

I think that mental space of, “if I don’t do this, we’re going to be in for a whole lot worse, and many more people are going to suffer” is where Valya lives. She’s constantly weighing consequences and outcomes, and that’s a very difficult place to exist in. I do think that her actions are very debatable, and I hope people want to spend time thinking about the “why” of it all because, writ large, these are the kinds of choices that a lot of leaders are making at any given time. 

The show gets into the concrete details of the Bene Gesserit’s origin, but what facets of the Sisterhood’s culture were you keen on fleshing out?

In the films, the Bene Gesserit are at the height of their intrigue and mystery with these scary nun vibes. They’re fascinating power players, and you want to know more about them and all the different angles they’ve been working. At times, they almost seem like they have superpowers to us, but it’s actually very grounded in the Dune universe, and the reality is that the Bene Gesserit have been refining — we call them “unlocks” — as a means of pushing humanity forward. They have found a way to harness more brain power, and they’re controlling their mind / body link in a way that’s beyond what any one of us could do today. I kind of liken it to how you see ice skaters who, in one year, are doing four spins in the air, but then the next year, you see them doing five, and everyone’s like “no one has ever been able to do that before, but now we’re seeing that it’s possible.”

The Bene Gesserit’s abilities are superhuman in a way, but they’re also skills based in the Sisterhood’s science, and we really wanted to show that these women have to work hard to do the things they do. There’s great risk in trying to push yourself to these mental and physical extreme limits. Not everyone succeeds, but what really fascinated me was exploring how these signature Bene Gesserit powers all grow out of people’s personal stories. It’s not a coincidence that the Voice has its origins in the Harkonnens and Valya.

Was your plan always to connect different Bene Gesserit in the past to specific powers that the entire Sisterhood becomes known for?

Yeah, the Bene Gesserit have this saying: “crisis, survival, advancement.” And we see that again and again in the series — that it’s really when people are pushed to the brink that they’re capable of these superhuman moments. You see it playing out in the origin of the Voice, but to understand the importance of that story, you have to appreciate that there’s a specificity to who originates each of these unlocks. 

For Valya, it’s the Voice; for Dorotea, it’s Truthsaying; and with Raquella Berto-Anirul, it’s accessing one’s Other Memory, which is the Bene Gesserit’s first real power. But it’s something that comes from Raquella’s past as a medic during the machine wars when she’s poisoned and uses her mind / body connection in a way she doesn’t understand to synthesize an antidote within her own body.

Through Lila, we see some of what the process of gaining your Other Memory looks like from within. Talk to me about what kind of feelings you wanted that scene in particular to leave people sitting in.

The Agony was a very protracted development process. We worked very closely with the visual effects team to figure out how to realize a mindscape where you could feel the terror of what, in the books, is described as your ancestors awakening within you. We wanted to convey how overwhelming that would be, especially in the beginning, where those ancestors are hungering for life, to be heard, and to express their pain. We wanted to create visuals that channeled the psychological horror of the experience but also the strength it would take to make it through the process. 

What were your goals when it came to showing us flashes of the machine war in the past?

We wanted to make people’s hatred of machines feel tangible but also to lean into this sense of concern about the potential for backsliding. Compared to the films, there’s a relative freshness to people’s memories about the suffering and abuse that defined the war. But a lot of our characters are a few generations out from the actual conflict, and their recollections of how things were are shifting.

With any kind of prohibition, there’s always the looming question of, “can you really put a genie back in a bottle?” Just because something is outlawed, you can never fully know whether it’s truly gone. In the pilot, we see that thinking machines haven’t been entirely eradicated, which raises the question of what else might be lurking out there. Is this the tip of an iceberg? If it is, what has to be protected against now, and how do you do that? 

Those were the questions we were thinking about, and the answers aren’t so simple, in part because people’s human natures are what gave rise to Dune’s thinking machines in the first place. Those ideas are core to Dune, but they felt especially relevant to our moment because of how artificial intelligence is being presented to us here in the real world as this technology that we should want because it can make things easier.

The show is airing at a time when a lot of people are thinking about tyranny in a very concrete way. What sorts of ideas about power and resistance did you want to really define Prophecy?

I think Dune is a really rich text that has something to say about the stories we tell ourselves about leaders and how the rhetoric of powerful institutions compares to the reality of what’s happening in people’s lives. There’s a real cautionary tale around or at least a call to interrogate the motivations of charismatic figures. The journey of Paul Atreides in the later novels is a really surprising one that’s not just a coming-of-age hero’s tale. It’s the opposite, and those books really dig into the different ways that power attracts the corruptible. 

Those realities are part of any culture or historic period, and in Dune, they manifest in very specific ways. But the questions behind them are always there and worth contemplating. Power is not static; it’s always flowing, and not always in a single direction like a throne. But resistance is also present and always will be in a world, like ours, that’s shaped by asymmetrical power.