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Anya Taylor-Joy Calls Alia Atreides Her Most Feral Role Yet in ‘Dune: Part Three’

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Anya Taylor-Joy is stepping into one of the most unsettling roles in Frank Herbert’s universe. In ‘Dune: Part Three’, she plays Alia Atreides, Paul’s sister, who is often called “the Abomination” in the ‘Dune’ world, and the character is set to play a much bigger part than her brief appearance in the last film.

Taylor-Joy first appeared as Alia in a cameo in ‘Dune: Part Two’, in which Paul has a vision of his sister while she is still in the womb. Now Denis Villeneuve’s final chapter brings her fully into the story, and she’s opening up about what the role demanded.

In a new interview with The New York Times, Taylor-Joy said bringing Alia to the screen was her most feral creation. She recalled a conversation with Villeneuve at the end of the movie in which she suddenly realized that she was playing the bad guy, which she found wild.

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Even so, she said she fully understood where Alia was coming from. She called it a gift to play someone whose only connection is to one person, to the point where nobody else matters at all.

Taylor-Joy added that this straightforwardness felt almost animalistic. She said she’d never done animal work before, but that Alia pushed her further into that territory than any of her previous roles.

Her comments point to one of the film’s bigger departures from ‘Dune Messiah’. As GamesRadar+ notes, Alia in the novel doesn’t actively plot against Paul the way Irulan and Scytale do.

The outlet also reports that Alia forms a close, illicit bond with Hayt, played by Jason Momoa, and that the relationship will be central to the film. Alia has also been aged up: she’s 16 in the novel, while Taylor-Joy is 30.

The shift fits a broader rethink of the saga’s moral compass. Chani is no longer Paul’s devoted partner and is reportedly working to unseat him as Emperor after the genocide carried out in his name.

The final trailer shows Robert Pattinson’s Scytale and Zendaya’s Chani trying to kill Paul. Taylor-Joy suggested the third film makes clear that Paul is no longer the moral hero of the story.

Taylor-Joy has been teasing Alia’s strangeness for months. After the first trailer was released, she said on The Today Show that there has never been anybody like Alia and that most people find her creepy, except her brother.

She also explained that Alia has absolute prescience and carries the voices of generations of people in her mind, so she is never really in a single conversation. Timothée Chalamet has reportedly called her performance terrifying.

The role came with some unusual moments behind the scenes. On Radio Andy’s ‘The Julia Cunningham Show’, Taylor-Joy said she walked into the prosthetics area and found a prop fetus version of Alia waiting for her.

She admitted the character is creepy but said she likes her. Trailers have so far shown her only briefly, including one shot of her covered in blood, which keeps much of her performance under wraps.

‘Dune: Part Three’ opens in theaters on December 18, the same day as ‘Avengers: Doomsday’. Villeneuve co-wrote the screenplay with Brian K. Vaughan, and the cast includes Chalamet, Zendaya, Momoa, Pattinson, Florence Pugh and Rebecca Ferguson. With Taylor-Joy calling Alia a villain and Paul’s heroism in question, the final chapter looks set to unsettle even longtime fans of the saga.

What are you most excited to see in Anya Taylor-Joy's portrayal of Alia Atreides in Dune: Part Three?

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