The much-awaited Dune: Part Two is finally out in cinemas, so we sat down with Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Florence Pugh, and Austin Butler to talk about on-set friendships, filming stunts, the world of Arrakis, and more!
Before we get into the film-related questions: what is something that each of you is grateful for?
Timothée: I’m grateful for this film. I'm grateful to be amongst castmates that I admire and look up to, and that I get to be in this incredible film and work with Denis Villeneuve.
Zendaya: I think without repeating [Timothée], I think every day we lead with gratitude, so I appreciate you asking that question. To be here is a privilege, it's an honour to have a job that I love with people that I get to know and love and care about. I think it’s a privilege, so being able to be here is very special. So I'm very grateful for every day that I get to wake up and do this.
Florence: Ditto Ditto. I also think being a part of a movie that is this impressive and this huge, knowing that we are a part of something unbelievably special that people will be watching for years and years and years to come. It's a very unique situation that we're all in. It's an unbelievably special moment in time for all of us to be releasing something as epic as this movie and knowing that it's going to continue the love and the journey. Yeah, it's it's a huge feeling. Very grateful feeling.
Austin: First of all, I'm grateful that you started with that question. I've never had an interview start that way. My mom used to write 10 things she was grateful for – I love that, thank you so much – sometimes I forget. So, you know when we do this a lot; go in and do press, and be surrounded by great people. There's no competition. There's no sense of negativity that I've felt at all. Like, there's just love and support and inspiration that I feel from each one of you.
The four of you are honestly a wild group of the “it” people at the moment. I have to know, Zendaya and Timothée, did you have any input into who you wanted to join the cast?
Timothée: No, well maybe you did.
Zendaya: Can you imagine?!
Timothée: I don't think we could have gotten luckier, I think about this a lot and I talked about this with a close friend – how kindness is so important of a virtue in this day and age. But I've loved Austin's response there because I feel so lucky to be amongst this group. And I really believe that in this day and age, with good measure: kindness and not bringing a negative energy, as Austin said, it's so important. So, no, I did not get a say in it. And I'm happy I didn't because we got the best group, you know.
Zendaya: Yeah, I would absolutely agree: dream casting here – and I think something that I've been so grateful for in this journey is being able to work with people who are also lovely people and enjoyable to work with. To learn and grow from them makes the whole experience so much better. So I think when you get that lucky to have incredibly talented people that you're like, ‘wow’, every time they walk in and watch what they do, but are also, like ‘hey, want to hang out?’ You know what I mean? Wanting to be around makes the experience so much better.
Florence: You can feel it in the press as well. Zendaya and I have been partnered for everything, and we just love talking about each other and talking about what the other person did – it's a very unique situation to be in to be doing press with people. I mean, obviously, you always hope to be admiring them, but to enjoy this much talking and hanging out and be constantly interested in what they have to say about their work, routine, or what went into making their character. It's been a really beautiful process doing this press tour as well as making it, and that's rare.
I also need to know, do the four of you have a group chat, and if so what's it called?
Florence: We need to do this!
Zendaya: We talked about this, but we haven’t done it yet!
Florence: The Spice Chicks!
Zendaya: The Spice Girls!
Zendaya and Florence: Plus two boys!
So you're talking about how much you love spending time with each other, you love the press tour, but you're not in a group chat together?!
Zendaya: We've been seeing each other every day. We actually hang out in real life.
Timothée: We have a weekly group Zoom.
Florence: Every Sunday we make a Yorkshire tea and watch some old reruns of X Factor and just chat to each other.
If each of you, as yourselves, could actually travel to Arrakis, what would you want to experience and what would be your biggest fear about visiting?
Zendaya: Are the Harkonnens there?!
Timothée: So Zendaya’s not coming!
Zendaya: The sandworms, while exciting, they're also kind of terrifying.
Florence: Yeah. And I wouldn't know how to [ride them], I wouldn't know, I'd be doing cartwheels and they’d instantly come right up! I think that expanding landscape would just be so stunning to look at. In any of these questions about ‘what would you take?’ Or ‘how would you be?’ I've always replied with like, ‘can I take Chani? Can Chani actually be there?’ If it's just us we would die within a day. Right? We wouldn't survive.
Timothée and Austin – you have quite the fight scene in this, what was training like to prepare you?
Austin: We had a lot of training individually before we even met. We had months of working on general fight training in Kali, which is Filipino stick fighting, that we did individually in LA for four to six months. And then we got to Hungary. Then we got together and the first day that we met Zendaya was there – we immediately got into the fight, and it's such a pivotal point in the film and in this story. We both have worked so hard to get together. It was really bonding. I was doing it in my hotel room, it was all I thought about. I still do it.
Timothée: I do it alone in front of the mirror!
Florence: But they were brilliant in it. They did it for a week, and they would do whole runs of the entire stunts. There were probably only one or two moves that the stuntees were kind of reserved to do, and they would still do that and give it a go. And it was so fast and it looked so dangerous, and they kept doing it all day, every day until it was completed. It was exhausting watching it because it's a very intense, high-pressured fight sequence. And they did it it was it was amazing. It was amazing to watch.
Obviously, on the press tour, you’ve probably been asked a million different questions at this point – is there anything you are yet to ask each other that you want to know?
Florence: I have a question for you Austin. Your bald cap: at what point in the day were you like ‘God I can’t wait to get it off’? Did it get uncomfortable and sticky and hot?
Austin: I would kind of get to a point where I would forget – it just feels like it's a part of you. And I was focused on so many other things, but it was usually when it got really hot. So in the arena scene, because I was outside in the sun at 110 degrees, and that's sweltering. So you end up overheating in a way, so that's when I would want to cut the damn thing off.
I did have the same question about the plastic nose pieces to be fair…
Austin: But you said the same thing about those, right?
Zendaya: You just kind of get used to it. Yeah, I think on the first film, I was only there for a week, and every day I was there I had snot in my nose. And I was like ‘man how is everybody acting so normal?’ I just couldn’t get it positioned right and it kept falling out, but this time I was just like ‘meh’.
Timothée: You literally get used to it because the first couple of days with the nose piece, I found my nose would be running, it felt irritated. But by the end, it was like it felt weird to not have it.
Watch the full interview here, and catch Dune 2 in cinemas now!
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