With The French Dispatch postponed until October, we're shifting our Timothée Chalamet radars to Dune. The sci-fi story is still slated to hit the cinemas this December, but Warner Bros has dropped some breadcrumbs to keep us hooked during these long, quarantine days in the form of the first pictures from the future blockbuster. In a Vanity Fair exclusive, Chalamet is first seen as his character Paul Atreides, walking on a cloudy, desolate beach with notes of Game Of Thrones, joined by pictures of Oscar Isaac as Duke Leto Atreides, Rebecca Ferguson Lady Jessica Atreides, and Zendaya as Chani, to name a few.
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The 1965 novel by Frank Herbert tells a story set in the far future when families don't control kingdoms, but planets. Chalamet's Paul has just taken control of the planet Arrakis. It's somewhat of a wasteland except for its production of "melange," a coveted spice that enhances people's minds. That makes ownership of the planet both a blessing and a curse as the families must navigate the politics of this outer-spacial world. The 2020 film will tell just half of this story, with a part two coming later.
“The immediately appealing thing about Paul was the fact that in a story of such detail and scale and world-building, the protagonist is on an anti-hero’s journey of sorts,” Chalamet told Vanity Fair. “He thinks he’s going to be sort of a young general studying his father and his leadership of a fighting force before he comes of age, hopefully a decade later, or something like that.”
In these new pictures, we see just how other-worldly Arrakis is. Not meant for human life, it forces the characters to wear large rubber suits with tubes into their noses in order to survive — a tall order for the actors in the 100 degree United Arab Emirates heat where they filmed.
“The shooting temperature was sometimes 120 degrees. They put a cap on it out there, if it gets too hot. I forget what the exact number is, but you can’t keep working," Chalamet explained. "In a really grounded way, it was helpful to be in the stillsuits and to be at that level of exhaustion.”
The film, directed by Arrival and Blade Runner 2049's Denis Villeneuve, also stars Javier Bardem as Stilgar, Stellan Skarsgard as Baron Vladimir, and Jason Momoa as Duncan Idaho. Consider these photos a reminder that you have plenty of time to read the very, very long original text to understand what all those names mean.