How powerful women in history informed Olivia Williams’ role in ‘Dune: Prophecy’

Olivia Williams is quick to admit that she was largely unfamiliar with the world of “Dune” before being cast in “Dune: Prophecy,” an HBO prequel series to Denis Villeneuve’s blockbuster films.

“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 sofa in London’s Charlotte Street Hotel, drinking coffee and attempting not to get croissant crumbs all over herself. She’s come from a yoga teacher training session, where earlier this morning she taught her first sequence. She’s enjoying learning to teach for the same reason she began acting at a young 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.”

Playing Tula Harkonnen in “Dune: Prophecy,” set 10,000 years before the events of Villeneuve’s “Dune,” didn’t necessarily require Williams to delve deeply into the mythology of Frank Herbert’s novels. The series, premiering Sunday, was inspired by 2012’s “Sisterhood of Dune,” by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, but showrunner Alison Schapker has expanded the characters and events 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 known as the Sisterhood.

(Attila Szvacsek / HBO)

The six episodes center on Tula and her older sister Valya (Emily Watson), who are at the helm of a mysterious faction known as the Sisterhood. The Sisterhood seeks to control the Imperium but is met with pushback from Emperor Javicco Corrino (Mark Strong), Empress Natalya (Jodhi May) and one of his soldiers, Desmond Hart (Travis Fimmel). Because the events occur long before those in “Dune,” Williams says it actually helped to be removed 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.”

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“It was a time of incredible paranoia,” adds Watson, speaking later over the phone, about the Tudor period. “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 series only weeks before “Dune: Prophecy” was shot in Budapest in the fall of 2022. She was brought in as a replacement for Shirley Henderson, who was initially cast as Tula before creative changes delayed the show’s production. Although Williams and Watson knew each other — they share an agent and have similar acting backgrounds — they had never appeared in a project together. They also 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” only weeks before it started shooting, but she already knew her co-star Emily Watson well, though it was the first time they worked together: “We were already like sisters.”

(The Tyler Twins/For The Times)

“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, began her career on the stage before appearing as Jane Fairfax in ITV’s 1996 adaptation of “Emma,” which starred her “Dune: Prophecy” cast mate Mark Strong as George Knightley. She rose to fame after a succession of blockbuster films, including Kevin Costner’s “The Postman,” Wes Anderson’s “Rushmore” and M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Sixth Sense.” It was a golden age in Hollywood that Williams compares to the “last days of the Roman Empire.” She loved the rush of promotion and press junkets, moving from five-star hotel to five-star hotel, a massive shift from her time as a theater actor.

“I remember on ‘The Postman’ we hit a record for junkets,” she says, leaning forward 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.”

In the years since, Williams has consistently appeared in film and TV, accepting parts of all sizes and scopes. She’s pursued “interesting roles,” regardless of the medium, for both the love of performing and because, as someone who started 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 final two seasons. It was a relatively small role, but Williams made it memorable, giving Camilla a dynamic energy that resonated through the finale. She even brought in a robe she wore for hair and makeup on “The Postman” to be Camilla’s dressing gown in a scene. Her enthusiastic approach was especially useful for Dominic West, who played 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 leadership and generosity was apparent during the making of “Dune: Prophecy.” Watson says she and Williams took it upon themselves to try to make sure everyone 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)

Although “Dune: Prophecy” has a broad narrative, shifting across two timelines to tell the Harkonnen sisters’ story, Schapker wanted it to remain as grounded as possible. The immersive sci-fi setting exists as a backdrop for a family struggle, where one sister, Valya, has always had more control than the other. Those tides begin to turn.

“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 uncertain on how much more she can reveal about the series. “I’m terrible at this,” she admits. “Never tell me anything. But what happens is worth hanging around for.”

Schapker confirms slightly more. “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 series underscores the female contribution to the Imperium, which Villeneuve recently cited as his own entry point into the films. It’s rare to see complicated women in sci-fi stories, particularly in a range of ages. For Williams, the Sisterhood, which eventually becomes the Bene Gesserit, reveals how difficult it is to allow women 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 idea of the Sisterhood choosing to be chaste and not have men around is something considered “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 Times)

Although Williams has been acting for decades, with clear ease in front of the camera, she says she always arrives on set as if she were the youngest person there. It wasn’t until “Counterpart,” which aired from 2017 to 2019 on Starz, that she realized this might 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 she feels confident as a performer, Williams says that there is a perception of her as prepared and in control. In her head, it sometimes feels 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,” something that was evident in every scene they shot together.

“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 next, Williams has joined the third season of Ryan Murphy’s Netflix anthology series “Monster,” which will focus on serial killer Ed Gein. She hopes to do more theater, but she says it’s difficult because the U.K. doesn’t prioritize funding the arts.

“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 certainly go back if the opportunity arose.

“I always say, ‘Is this part worth doing? Is it 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.”