Throughout all six episodes of Dune: Prophecy, the journey of Valya Harkonnen — from an outcast of a disgraced house to the leader of the powerful Sisterhood — is central to nearly everything that happens in the series. And, because the role is so big and formative for the Dune saga, it’s taken two actresses to pull it off. In the present tense of the show, the venerable Emily Watson is Mother Valya, but in the flashbacks in the first and third episodes of the show, Jessica Barden plays a younger version of Valya.
Arguably, although Watson carries the heavier burden of leading the entire show, it’s Barden’s younger version of Valya who we see making formative, galaxy-shaking decisions. So, which Valya is the most pivotal? And could we see Barden’s version again, even outside of the Prophecy flashbacks? Smack dab in the middle of Dune: Prophecy’s explosive run of episodes, Inverse chatted with Jessica Barden to get her “truth-sense” on the past, present, and future of Dune.
Spoilers ahead for Episodes 1-4 of Dune: Prophecy.
Although Barden plays Valya in the past, Barden made it clear that she did not want to imitate Emily Watson, the person. Although imagining a younger Watson was easy, thanks to her incredible film career, Barden points out that’s not how acting works.
“I’d never seen Breaking the Waves, actually,” Barden admits to Inverse. “And I was like, ‘I can’t watch it now.’ That’s such a specific Emily Watson thing. I didn’t want to get bogged down in trying to be like her in any way. But I didn’t go and emulate her, because if I watched those older movies, it’s not really her. She’s an English movie star. She’s always playing a character.”
Instead, Barden focuses all her energy on being Valya Harkonnen in the here-and-now of the series. We may view her moments as very extended flashbacks, but the character doesn’t see herself that way.
“The work that was on the page did so much of it. It was so well informed, thanks to this really rich universe established in the books,” Barden explains. “The fact that she comes from the books, that she’s a fully established character, helped me trust. All I had to do was to be grounded and do something modern with it.”
“There’s things that they skipped to do in a second season.”
It’s unclear how much more Barden will appear in Dune: Prophecy after the third episode. With only two more episodes to go in this season, her flashback story seems, perhaps, complete. And yet, in the world of Dune, characters can reappear in visions, or also, quite literally, as ghola clones in the far future. In fact, Barden even hinted that there were various aspects of her character’s life from books like Sisterhood of Dune and Mentats of Dune that were excluded from the series — at least, in this season.
“There’s things that they skipped to do in a second season,” Barden says. She adds that she’s not sure if various plotlines will be adapted, but that the background of her version of Valya is closer to what happens in the Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson novels. “Obviously, our story, the Valya, Tula and Griffin and the Harkonnens, that story, is in the books, so there’s a lot of material there.”
This notion, that the flashbacks in Dune: Prophecy are where most of the direct book analogs come from, was echoed by showrunner Alison Schapker when she told Inverse: “Our young Valya Harkonnen [Barden] who’s our Mother Superior of the Sisterhood — that is more [from the] book... and then, Emily Watson, who is the adult more mature leader version of Valya, that’s our bit, where we’re extrapolating.”
Barden is right: If Dune: Prophecy gets a second season, there’s more book flashback material to cover. But the other interesting idea is the notion that Barden could play a Harkonnen descendent of herself. In fact, she suggests that, at one point, there was a plan for her to play a male Harkonnen in a different context.
“They said they were, like, going to put a mustache on me.”
“They’ve had various conversations about so many different things,” she says. “They said they were, like, going to put a mustache on me. They have a lot of ideas.”
As of now, Barden maintains she doesn’t know if she could return to Dune. But she thinks there are several ways it could happen, and if it does, she’s ready. “I don’t know what it could be,” she says. “But, I’ll do whatever they want me to do! I love being in this show.”
