Olivia Williams is fast to confess that she was largely unfamiliar with the world of “Dune” earlier than being solid in “Dune: Prophecy,” an HBO prequel sequence to Denis Villeneuve’s blockbuster movies.
“I’m going to be honest with you,” she says, with amiable frankness. “I knew nothing about it. But I have two teenage daughters, so Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya? I don’t miss a lot of their work if I want to have a conversation with my children. You can imagine sitting watching ‘Euphoria’ with your 15-year-old. Very intense.”
Williams, 56, is lounging on a settee in London’s Charlotte Road Lodge, consuming espresso and making an attempt to not get croissant crumbs throughout herself. She’s come from a yoga instructor coaching session, the place earlier this morning she taught her first sequence. She’s having fun with studying to show for a similar cause she started appearing at a younger age. “I just wanted to climb up onstage,” she says. “I quite like being in the audience, but I’d much rather be the one performing.”
Enjoying Tula Harkonnen in “Dune: Prophecy,” set 10,000 years earlier than the occasions of Villeneuve’s “Dune,” didn’t essentially require Williams to delve deeply into the mythology of Frank Herbert’s novels. The sequence was impressed by 2012’s “Sisterhood of Dune,” by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, however showrunner Alison Schapker has expanded the characters and occasions to “tell stories in a fresh way.” “We have tremendous respect for what’s in the novel,” Schapker says in an interview over Zoom. “It allowed us to look at the effects of the past and the present within one lifetime.”
In “Dune: Prophecy,” Olivia Williams’ Tula Harkonnen co-presides over a mysterious faction often called the Sisterhood.
(Attila Szvacsek / HBO)
The six episodes heart on Tula and her older sister Valya (Emily Watson), who’re on the helm of a mysterious faction often called the Sisterhood. The Sisterhood seeks to regulate the Imperium however is met with pushback from Emperor Javicco Corrino (Mark Robust), Empress Natalya (Jodhi Could) and one in all his troopers, Desmond Hart (Travis Fimmel). As a result of the occasions happen lengthy earlier than these in “Dune,” Williams says it truly helped to be faraway from the lore.
“My character doesn’t know what’s going to happen in the future, so I was called on to embody this person, in this time, in the room with these people who have extraordinary powers,” Williams says. “Emily and I did some research together, but it was more going to the National Portrait Gallery [in London] and looking at Tudor portraits of Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots. We talked about powerful sisters and powerful families, whether it’s 10,000 years in the future or 700 years in the past.”
“It was a time of incredible paranoia,” provides Watson, talking later over the telephone, in regards to the Tudor interval. “Everything was controlled in a way that we would be horrified by now — very powerful, very paranoid leaders with a lot of secrets presenting one thing publicly and having a lot of machinations going on privately. That was the kind of stuff we talked about.”
Williams joined the sequence solely weeks earlier than “Dune: Prophecy” was shot in Budapest within the fall of 2022. She was introduced in as a substitute for Shirley Henderson, who was initially solid as Tula earlier than artistic adjustments delayed the present’s manufacturing. Though Williams and Watson knew one another — they share an agent and have comparable appearing backgrounds — that they had by no means appeared in a challenge collectively. Additionally they have what Schapker calls “a shared approach to the craft that was very exciting to behold.”
“We are already like sisters,” Williams says of Watson. “I’ve known her as long as I’ve known my sister. She and I were together at the Royal Shakespeare Company in the ’90s, but we’ve never worked together. This was an exciting proposition.”
Williams joined “Dune: Prophecy” solely weeks earlier than it began capturing, however she already knew her co-star Emily Watson properly, although it was the primary time they labored collectively: “We were already like sisters.”
(The Tyler Twins/For The Occasions)
“We’ve had several conversations about how when we were in our 20s we had no expectation that this would be where we’d be,” Watson says. “We thought, ‘This is a game of diminishing returns and we will be playing grannies.’ Because, particularly in film, there just weren’t interesting parts for women of our age. And now there are.”
Williams, who grew up in London, started her profession on the stage earlier than showing as Jane Fairfax in ITV’s 1996 adaptation of “Emma,” which starred her “Dune: Prophecy” solid mate Mark Robust as George Knightley. She rose to fame after a succession of blockbuster movies, together with Kevin Costner’s “The Postman,” Wes Anderson’s “Rushmore” and M. Night time Shyamalan’s “The Sixth Sense.” It was a golden age in Hollywood that Williams compares to the “last days of the Roman Empire.” She liked the frenzy of promotion and press junkets, transferring from five-star resort to five-star resort, a large shift from her time as a theater actor.
“I remember on ‘The Postman’ we hit a record for junkets,” she says, leaning ahead with glee. “I was an unemployed actor in a damn basement in Camden Town, and then I was going around the world on Kevin Costner’s jet doing press junkets. And making a film, you have to pay for what you take out of the minibar, but on the press junket, they pay for it. I’ve still got my nail brush from the Ritz from 1997.”
Within the years since, Williams has constantly appeared in movie and TV, accepting elements of all sizes and scopes. She’s pursued “interesting roles,” whatever the medium, for each the love of performing and since, as somebody who began in theater, “I fear unemployment.”
“I do take work and I love doing things that are a bit off beam,” Williams says. “I take jobs because I love them. Sometimes that really works out. With ‘An Education,’ people said, ‘Why are you doing this?’ It was a small part in a beautiful, perfectly formed film, and it ended up going to the Oscars. Same with ‘The Father.’”
In 2022, Williams reemerged into the cultural zeitgeist on “The Crown,” portraying Camilla Parker Bowles over the ultimate two seasons. It was a comparatively small position, however Williams made it memorable, giving Camilla a dynamic vitality that resonated by means of the finale. She even introduced in a gown she wore for hair and make-up on “The Postman” to be Camilla’s dressing robe in a scene. Her enthusiastic strategy was particularly helpful for Dominic West, who performed Prince Charles.
“She’s extremely good at making something out of very little,” West says. “She could do a lot with a look. With Camilla, there was a humility to it. A giving-ness, which you don’t come around that often. Sometimes you’re in a bit of a contest with your co-stars, and there was never any question of that with Olivia. She was there to serve the scene and often to help me along, and that was very striking.”
Schapker and Watson say that sense of management and generosity was obvious through the making of “Dune: Prophecy.” Watson says she and Williams took it upon themselves to strive to ensure everybody was OK. “As the company leaders, it’s your job to make sure everyone’s being seen,” she says. “Olivia is really good at that.”
Emily Watson, left, with Olivia Williams in “Dune: Prophecy.” “At the beginning, my character is seriously subordinate to her powerful and terrifying older sister,” Williams says.
(Attila Szvacsek / HBO)
Though “Dune: Prophecy” has a broad narrative, shifting throughout two timelines to inform the Harkonnen sisters’ story, Schapker wished it to stay as grounded as doable. The immersive sci-fi setting exists as a backdrop for a household battle, the place one sister, Valya, has at all times had extra management than the opposite. These tides start to show.
“At the beginning, my character is seriously subordinate to her powerful and terrifying older sister,” Williams says. “But she’s looking for an opportunity to shine or to be given responsibility, and she has an extraordinary history.”
She’s unsure on how rather more she will reveal in regards to the sequence. “I’m terrible at this,” she admits. “Never tell me anything. But what happens is worth hanging around for.”
Schapker confirms barely extra. “We explore that shift that happens in a lot of families and what happens when your younger sister reveals herself as a force to be reckoned with,” she says. “We wanted to see Tula come out from various shadows in the series and to peel back the layers on this sister dynamic.”
The sequence underscores the feminine contribution to the Imperium, which Villeneuve lately cited as his personal entry level into the movies. It’s uncommon to see sophisticated ladies in sci-fi tales, notably in a variety of ages. For Williams, the Sisterhood, which finally turns into the Bene Gesserit, reveals how tough it’s to permit ladies to have authority.
“The root of it is still quite traditional and patriarchal in that these powerful women have to be sequestered from men and are essentially living in a convent,” Williams says. “It is cloistered, but with an underlying power.”
She says the thought of the Sisterhood selecting to be chaste and never have males round is one thing thought of “intensely mysterious and threatening.”
“What is it that women get up to when the blokes aren’t looking?” Williams says. “They really want to know, and that’s quite fun to act. God forbid that there should be anything going on that men don’t ultimately know about or control.”
“What is it that women get up to when the blokes aren’t looking?” Williams says. “They really want to know, and that’s quite fun to act.” (The Tyler Twins / For The Occasions)
Though Williams has been appearing for many years, with clear ease in entrance of the digital camera, she says she at all times arrives on set as if she have been the youngest particular person there. It wasn’t till “Counterpart,” which aired from 2017 to 2019 on Starz, that she realized this may not be true.
“Someone came up to me and said, ‘You know, it’s such an honor to work with someone so experienced,’ ” she says, laughing. “I realized, ‘Oh, my God. I’m the grand dame of this show. I’m the oldest person here!’ So things [like that] happen and I do realize that I’m very experienced, but it takes me by surprise every time.”
Whether or not she feels assured as a performer, Williams says that there’s a notion of her as ready and in management. In her head, it typically feels completely different.
“I genuinely like to take the temperature on every project, and I really like a director to tell me what they want,” she says. “It’s the pleasure of my job to be the conduit — to Olivia Williams-ize or to Tula Harkonnen-ize what the director says. But there are times when the director says, ‘What do you want to do?’ and I will have something to say.”
Watson describes Williams as “incredibly smart,” one thing that was evident in each scene they shot collectively.
“She’s like a dog with a bone,” Watson says. “She will take a piece of text and really chew it and argue it. It’s very stimulating. And it’s lovely to have that kind of working relationship where you just understand what’s needed and how you’re going to find things.”
As for what’s subsequent, Williams has joined the third season of Ryan Murphy’s Netflix anthology sequence “Monster,” which is able to concentrate on serial killer Ed Gein. She hopes to do extra theater, however she says it’s tough as a result of the U.Ok. doesn’t prioritize funding the humanities.
“I don’t want it to be something that you can only do if you can afford to,” she says of British theater. “I can afford to do it, but there are brilliant actors who are theater actors who can’t afford to work for that. I’ve got ‘Dune: Prophecy’ to fall back on, but for the rest of the cast, that is their income. Making it work at that level of cost is actually destroying it.”
As for a second season of “Dune: Prophecy,” Williams acknowledges, “They haven’t taken the sets down.” She would definitely return if the chance arose.
“I always say, ‘Is this part worth doing? Is is worth being apart from my family?’” she says. “Budapest: lovely. Paycheck: lovely. Costumes: lovely. But most importantly, is the acting worthwhile? Is this something of interest to someone at my stage in my career? I’ve got stuff I want to do. I don’t want to be marking time. And this absolutely felt worth it.”