I’ve watched enough behind-the-scenes footage from Denis Villeneuve’s book-to-screen adaptation of the Dune series to know making Arrakis convincing takes a lot of sand. But hearing Zendaya and Robert Pattinson describe what filming the final installment in the movie franchise was like has me reaching for a glass of ice water. Apparently, playing people who live on a desert planet involves wishing you weren’t on one.
Zendaya and Pattinson joined their co-stars for a conversation with The New York Times about Villeneuve’s trilogy finale, which arrives on the 2026 movie schedule in December. Zendaya, who reprised Chani for the film, said the blazing sun made acting with her face difficult. Between the heat and the early calls for makeup and prosthetics, it was anything but relaxing. As she tells it:
The hardest thing is to just meditate through the heat. There’s scenes where the sun is so bright that I am trying to give another facial expression other than [Zendaya scrunches up her face as if in pain] and I physically can’t. [Laughs] I was just pouring sweat, trying to focus, keep my eyes open as much as I can. You’ve got to get ready and set up before the sun starts coming up, while it’s still cool, and also we had to get into the prosthetics of it all. No one earlier than Rob.
I’m sorry, but if the weather is physically preventing me from making facial expressions, I’m calling it a day. Seriously, I have enough trouble concentrating when the air conditioning goes out. Zendaya still has to convey Chani’s complicated feelings about Paul Atreides while the sun tries to cook her through her costume.
Then there’s Pattinson, who joins the franchise as Scytale. You’d think a newcomer might find the machinery overwhelming when it sounds like something from an amusement park. Instead, the actor seemed delighted by an elaborate sequence, explaining:
The desert is just another level. There’s this one sequence where I’m in this spaceship, on a gimbal, on the edge of a sand dune, and we had this 350-foot-long model of a sandworm. The scale of this stuff is just unbelievable, you’re having your own “Dune” theme park, where the gimbal is going upside down and flying, and this is not like work at all. There are no negatives.
A 350-foot sandworm model? I love details like that. Villeneuve could presumably leave plenty of the spectacle to visual effects, but building something that enormous gives the actors a very real piece of Arrakis to react to. Of course, Pattinson’s declaration that there were “no negatives” came with a fairly disgusting exception. He continued:
Apart from having your sweat drained out of the top of your head, and getting like bulbous sweat bubbles. But even then, I didn’t even really notice them. He’s so easy to work with, Denis, it’s never really a stress.
“Bulbous sweat bubbles” is an image I would have happily gone my entire life without imagining. Still, I appreciate how much he enjoyed working with Villeneuve, even if his body apparently found a brand-new way to perspire.
Dune: Part Three picks up nearly two decades after Paul’s rise to power and concludes Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s saga. It’s due in theaters December 18, going head-to-head with Marvel’s Avengers: Doomsday. Judging by these cast stories from the making of Dune, the performers earned every minute we’ll spend sitting comfortably in an air-conditioned auditorium. I’ll gladly watch the sandworms, with my wildly themed popcorn bucket in hand, from the comfort of a reclined theater seat.
