Zendaya’s and Florence Pugh’s Dune characters are set up for a galactic rivalry

polygon.com:

The latest trailer for Dune: Part Two starts just like 2021’s Dune: In the middle of a desert with Zendaya’s character Chani. But anyone who expected to see a lot of Zendaya in 2021’s Dune would have been sorely disappointed: She’s barely in the thing until the very end!

The good news is, if Dune: Part Two is anything like Frank Herbert’s Dune (and 2021’s Dune certainly was), we’ll be seeing a lot more of Chani, and Zendaya’s portrayal, when the movie hits theaters in November. Plenty of time between now and then to read Dune and find out what happens for yourself.

But if you’d rather not wait or read the book, here’s a quick rundown anyway.

Daughter of the researcher/planetologist Liet Kynes (played by Sharon Duncan-Brewster) and a fremen tribesperson, Chani and Paul Atreides meet in the book in exactly the same way they do in the 2021 movie — at a knife fight. Paul has recurring visions of a young blue-eyed woman who turns out to be Chani, a fremen warrior assigned to guide him and his exiled mother in their integration into the Fremen.

[Ed. note: I’m about to describe the whole ending of Dune. This is your spoiler warning for a 60-year-old book.]

Paul spends two years of exile with the Fremen before the forces of history bend him into becoming their messianic leader. And in that time, Chani and Paul fall in love (without marrying) and have a child (though their baby is killed in an imperial raid on a Fremen encampment before the book comes to a close). Chani stands with Paul through the whole story of Dune, and we can expect them to be a big part of Dune: Part Two.

Dune director Denis Villeneuve recently told Vanity Fair, “I kept saying to my crew, ‘The most important thing is that spark, that relationship