‘Dune: Prophecy’: How Olivia Williams & Emily Watson’s Longtime Friendship Led To “Powerful And Damaged” Sister Roles In “A Really Tasty Plot”

deadline.com:

Since their early 20s, Emily Watson and Olivia Williams’ careers have run on parallel tracks. Born one year apart, they first got to know each other by pondering their futures together on a patch of grass outside The Black Swan pub in Stratford-upon-Avon. “We met at the Royal Shakespeare Company, in the early ’90s, where we were in different plays in different seasons,” says Williams.

The two never ended up on stage together. “Partly because there aren’t that many scripts around for two leading ladies of the same age,” adds Watson.

Their paths would soon cross again, as Williams made her foray into Hollywood, with Kevin Costner’s The Postman and Wes Anderson’s Rushmore, around the same time as Watson was leveraging her breakout success in Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves. “I was staying at the Four Seasons and we had a cosmopolitan, as was the fashion then,” recalls Williams. “There’s something bonding about those years for those of us for whom it felt like slight pioneering into Hollywood in the late ’90s.

Every generation has the people who turn up in Los Angeles, and in those days you had a Thomas Guide on your lap.” As they spent the next two decades building notable careers—once even sharing billing, if not screen time, in Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina—what neither foresaw was that a science fiction epic would unite them professionally.