In Dune: Part 2, Zendaya and Florence Pugh are both playing women whose lives are romantically and politically intertwined with the fate of Timothée Chalamet’s Paul Atreides.
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. Who is Chani, Zendaya’s character in the Dune movies?
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.
