Dune: Part Two star Rebecca Ferguson reveals the parenting power she wishes she had
There is one thing Dune: Part Two star Rebecca Ferguson would like to take from her character which would boost her parenting tools.
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Rebecca Ferguson thinks it was inevitable that she would bring some of her own experiences as a mother into her role in Dune: Part Two.
“I think naturally you bring things in that you know,” she agrees over Zoom call from London.
“I think if you are a parent – for me anyway, I can’t speak for everyone – it comes quite naturally to want to protect and teach.”
The Swedish star of the Mission: Impossible franchise (her fan-favourite character Ilsa Faust came to a sticky end during last year’s instalment Dead Reckoning) and The Greatest Showman is a mother of two, a five-year-old daughter with businessman husband Rory St Clair Gainer and a teenage son to a former partner.
And while she lives comfortable life with her family in a trendy part of London, travelling the world to wherever her work takes her, it’s fair to say that the stakes are rather higher for Lady Jessica Atreides the character she played in the critical and commercial 2021 hit Dune.
In the eagerly anticipated Dune: Part Two, which opens in cinemas next week and picks up the action where the first film left off, Lady Jessica’s son Paul (played by actor of the moment Timothee Chalamet), may or may not be a long-foretold Messiah figure destined to cause the death of billions across the known universe in a holy war.
For any mother, no matter how protective of her child, that’s a lot to get her head around – and personal experience can only go so far.
“I think what’s more interesting is the journey that she needs to do quite quickly accepting and letting go and trusting – with such consequences and high stakes,” she says.
“We don’t have that our lives – I don’t have that in my life.”
But if there was one thing Ferguson would like to take from Jessica – a member of a mysterious religious sect known as the Bene Gesserit – it’s the Voice, a mystical power that enables its users to bend the weaker minded to their will, and which she thinks could be a valuable parenting tool.
“I have my own version and for me it goes something like this …,” she says, staring down the camera with an icy look that could strip the paint from a car.
“I use it on my husband but it doesn’t work. It’s fantastic though – can you imagine the power?”
Denis Villeneuve, a good friend as well as her Dune director, thinks that Ferguson has “the wildest character to play” in the new movie – no mean feat in a story that also features riders of giant sandworms, religious fanatics, a floating, morbidly obese war lord and a bald, knife-wielding psychopath.
Over the course of the movies, Lady Jessica transforms from the privileged concubine of a murdered duke, who has lost her home, people and planet and been sent into exile, into a tattooed-faced, desert-dwelling priestess who gains the ability to speak to her unborn daughter and will stop at nothing to see her son ascend to the throne.
“She wants her son to become the king and will do everything she can to fulfil this desire,” says Villeneuve. “She is one of the darkest, most powerful forces in this story, the ultimate chess player, and Rebecca absolutely nailed it.”
One of Villeneuve’s goals when tackling Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi classic, which was first adapted for the big screen in David Lynch’s ambitious 1984 flop (although at since gained a cult following), was to elevate the role of the women in the story. He gender-flipped a key role in the first part and Ferguson’s character plays a more pivotal role in the new film, as does Zendaya’s character of Chani, than they do in the books.
And while many of Herbert’s key themes of environmentalism, colonialism, power and fundamentalism remain front and centre, Ferguson was glad that she got to benefit from Villeneuve’s more modern take on gender relations.
“He’s not writing the 1960s version – it was quite different back then,” Ferguson says. “And in the interviews that I have read and the way that Denis speaks it was very important for him to see it through the eyes of these very strong characters and to bring forth women and especially Jessica, who became the architect of this film. So I am riding on his creation, basically.”
Ferguson says she’s in awe of the Oscar-nominated Villeneuve (Sicario, Arrival, Blade Runner: 2046), not just for his talent and imagination but for leading by example on the massive sets and in far-flung locations. Parts of Dune: Part Two shot were shot in very trying conditions in the deserts of Jordan and Abu Dhabi, and despite a star-studded cast that also includes Chalomet, Zendaya, Florence Pugh, Josh Brolin, Austin Butler and Javier Bardem, Ferguson says “there are no selfish egos on Denis’ sets”.
“That’s due to him,” she says. “Like before, everyone was so friendly, so kind, so generous; everyone can be themselves and feel safe in who they are and what they want to deliver. That is unique and it is about how Denis creates an environment. His are really among the best sets I’ve ever been on.”
Dune: Part Two opens in cinemas on February 29.
WHO’S NEW IN DUNE 2?
Director Denis Villeneuve assembled an extraordinary cast for his first Dune film – from Oscar-winners and Oscar nominees in Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin and Timothee Chalomet to shredded superhero stars in Jason Momoa and Dave Bautista. For Part Two, he’s upped the ante even more.
ZENDAYA
Despite the promotional material that put her front and centre, Zendaya only spent a few days shooting the first movie. But as Chalomet’s love interest, the fiercely independent warrior Chani, the Euphoria and Spider-Man star, makes a much deeper impression. Rebecca Ferguson calls her “the most exquisite role model” and Villeneuve adjudged her to be “an astonishing, stunning, incredible actor that can express a rainbow of emotions with very little effort”.
AUSTIN BUTLER
Having transformed into the King of Rock and Rock all the way to an Oscar-nomination for Elvis, the American actor is so terrifying as the bald, black-toothed, psychopathic villain Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen that he completely freaked out Ferguson on set. His on-screen mortal enemy Chalomet says of their brutal face-off in the film, for which both trained for months: “he’s a super hard worker, he really cares about the work and that whole sequence was just epic — no other way to put it.” Sting, the man who played the same part in the 1984 version, sporting spiky hair and space-age silver hot pants, last year declared himself to be a fan of Villeneuve’s take and Butler, saying “it wasn’t as camp as our version, but it was visually spectacular”.
FLORENCE PUGH
The last time Timothee Chalomet and Pugh worked together was in Barbie director Greta Gerwig’s very genteel period drama, Little Women. The British star of Black Widow and Oppenheimer shows a very different side as the shrewd, pragmatic heir to the galactic throne, Princess Irulan. “She brought a steeliness, a fierceness, to this role that is just incredible,” says Chalomet. Pugh, who recalls mockingly bowing down to the newly minted megastar Chalomet on Little Women, says she was such a fan of the first film that “If Denis told me I could be Spear Carrier #3, I’d have said yes, just to experience the entire beast of this movie”.
CHRISTOPHER WALKEN
The Oscar-winning star of The Deer Hunter, Hairspray and The Wedding Crashers says he was uncertain how to play a king on stage the first time he was asked to, having grown up on the mean streets of Queens. But as the coldly calculating, all-powerful Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV he realised that power is “seen by reflection”. “I didn’t have to try to be the Emperor, I just relied on Denis Villeneuve and the beautiful sets and the costumes and that if people treated me like the Emperor, then I’d be okay,” he says. Ferguson says she was “terrified” of approaching the Hollywood veteran, but Pugh, who plays his daughter says, “all of my scenes were with him, so I had to break that fear pretty quickly”.
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