Warner Bros. has released a new photo from Dune. The photo shows Timothee Chalamet as Paul Atreides, getting a hand up from weapons master Gurney Halleck, played by Josh Brolin. This would be shortly after House Atreides arrives on the desert planet of Arrakis. “It’s Paul’s first contact with the deep desert, where he’s mesmerized by it,” Dune director Denis Villeneuve tells Empire Magazine of the photo. “He has a strange feeling of being home. There’s a lot of action at this specific moment, and [it’s] one of the scenes in the movie that I’m starting to get pretty proud of.”
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Paul’s arrival on Arrakis awakens a hidden power within him, setting him on the path towards becoming a reluctant messiah. “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 said in another interview. “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.”
Game of Thrones and Aquaman star Jason Momoa plays Duncan Idaho in Dune. He’s said that the film is bigger than either of that past epic experiences. “We got to shoot in Wadi Rum. I’ve never seen anything like it, it was like shooting on another planet,” Momoa said during a video interview on The Ellen Show. “Denis Villeneuve is shooting it, who made Sicario and Arrival. It was an honor to do that with him, and it’s a pretty stellar cast, I’ve never been a part of something so big.
“I get to play this character Duncan Idaho, who’s kind of a master swordsman who’s made the right-hand man to Duke Leto who is Oscar Isaac. He’s the first person to be sent out to land on Dune and that’s when I meet the character that Javier Bardem plays. I can’t believe I had a scene with Javier Bardem! It’s a pretty massive film and I get to be this little — he’s kind of the Han Solo-esque of the group. He’s this rogue warrior who protects Timothée Chalamet (Paul Atreides) and serves Oscar Isaac.”
The film is described, “A mythic and emotionally charged hero’s journey, Dune tells the story of Paul Atreides, a brilliant and gifted young man born into a great destiny beyond his understanding, who must travel to the most dangerous planet in the universe to ensure the future of his family and his people. As malevolent forces explode into conflict over the planet’s exclusive supply of the most precious resource in existence-a commodity capable of unlocking humanity’s greatest potential-only those who can conquer their fear will survive.”
Dune is set to open in theaters on December 18th.