“The dentist will see you now!” chuckles Emily Watson, offering me a seat beneath the blindingly bright lights set up for the TV interviews she has lined up for a busy morning promoting Dune: Prophecy . It’s a series that the 57-year-old actor is clearly delighted to sell to me as “a big budget sci-fi series led by not one but two women in their fifties. Neither of whom have had any work done.
” Best known for her fearless breakthrough role as a sexually self-sacrificing oil rigger’s wife in Lars Von Trier ’s Breaking the Waves (1996) and, more recently, as a tenacious nuclear physicist in Sky Atlantic’s Chernobyl (2019) Watson is crisply aware that both she and her Dune: Prophecy co-star, Olivia Williams, 56, are benefitting from the long overdue culture shift that’s put complex female characters at the heart of screen narratives. They’re both clever, adventurous actors who started out on the stage with the Royal Shakespeare company and who – even 10 years ago – might have been expected to spend middle age in bustles and bonnets pursing their lips in the backgrounds of period dramas. Instead they’re having a juicy great interstellar blast as Valya (Watson) and Tula Harkennon (Williams): fierce leaders of a futuristic cult in a six-part prequel to Denis Villeneuve’s 2021 and 2024 film adaptations of Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi novel, Dune .
While Villeneuve’s films are male led and set on the barren, sandworm infested desert planet of Arrakis, t.