The Bene Gesserit Scene Rebecca Ferguson Desperately Wanted In Dune: Part One

If there’s one thing Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune” films make clear, it’s that you do not want to mess with the Bene Gesserit. They’re basically a cult of space witches, and they’re all trained to be as lethal and cunning as possible. They can command you to do their bidding with the Voiceand they have casual access to a Gom Jabbar, a handheld needle tipped with cyanide that’ll kill you within seconds.

Rebecca Ferguson, who stars in Villeneuve’s “Dune” movies as Paul Atreides’ (Timothée Chalamet) mother Lady Jessica (a Bene Gesserit witch who teaches her son her many skills), has a lot of fun playing such a dangerous character. However, she does have some regrets about what Villeneuve’s first “Dune” film, in particular, was able to include from Frank Herbert’s source material. Like all movie adaptations, Villeneuve’s “Dune” had to drop certain elements from Herbert’s original book, and a lot of the cut material would’ve helped to better illustrate the sheer extent of how advanced the Bene Gesserit had become by the time the film takes place.

Among the scenes that didn’t make the jump to the screen — but which Ferguson, in particular, really wanted to include — was a moment from early in Herbert’s novel, in which Jessica uncovers a hidden message from another Bene Gesserit witch. The message is a bunch of tiny dots on the back of a leaf; by running her finger along it, Jessica is easily able to decode it. “Your son and the Duke are in immediate danger,” the message reads, warning her of the assassination plot against Paul (which is, thankfully, soon averted). The assassination attempt is featured in Villeneuve’s movie, but the scene where Jessica finds out about it ahead of time isn’t:

“What I find interesting is the idea that people had to be so tolerant and so ahead of the game,” Ferguson explained in a 2024 interview with Collider. “We often talk about being 10 steps ahead; we’re talking about being years and lightyears ahead of planting ideas and religious thoughts. One of (the) scenes that we didn’t get in (Villeneuve’s first ‘Dune’ movie), which was one of my favorite ones from the book — and I tried to get us to get it in, but it’s a big moment — is the communication of one Bene Gesserit to another underneath the leaf. The sign language. Do you remember?”

She acknowledged that the Max spinoff series, “Dune: Prophecy,” dives deeper into elements like thisbut that doesn’t lessen the blow much — given that the “Dune” prequel series is set 10,000 years before Jessica has even been born. “I mean, that doesn’t give anything to me, does it?” Ferguson joked. “What am I gonna be? Happy for other people?”

The good news is that “Dune: Messiah,” Herbert’s second “Dune” book and the one Villeneuve’s third “Dune” movie will be based on, features plenty of Bene Gesserit scheming to go around. And sure, Jessica famously doesn’t appear in the novel version of “Messiah,” but given the major structural changes Villeneuve has made in his “Dune” films so far, it’s likely Jessica will have a role to play in the next one. Perhaps she’ll get to act out the scene in the “Messiah” novel where two Bene Gesserit women know they’re being observed, so they speak innocent dialogue with their regular voices while using subtle inflections and facial tics to communicate their real meaning. Their training is so advanced that they’re able to have two entirely different conversations at once, with one of them undetectable to the untrained eye.

It’ll be a complicated thing to depict on screen, but hopefully Villeneuve takes the risk anyway. The Gene Besserit have lots of cool, advanced methods of communication, so ideadlly we’ll get to see as many of them adapted to the screen as possible.