Dune star confirms he is returning in third film: ‘If you didn't read the books, it's not my fault'
Fans who believed they had seen the last of Jason Momoa 's Duncan Idaho in Dune can rest easy as the actor has confirmed he is returning in the final part of the trilogy.
The Game of Thrones star appeared in the first instalment of the sci-fi blockbuster, Dune, in 2021, playing Duncan Idaho, a swordmaster of House Atreides, who mentors Timothée Chalamet 's Paul Atreides in the martial arts.
Idaho sacrifices himself to allow Paul and his mother Jessica, played by Rebecca Ferguson, time to escape an ambush, similar to how he dies in the Frank Herbert novel that the Denis Villeneuve -directed film is adapted from.
He did not reprise his role in Dune: Part Two, which released in 2024.
Speaking to Craig Melvin on Today, Momoa confirmed his appearance in Dune 3, which is reportedly based on Herbert's Dune Messiah.
'I'm making a comeback,' said the Aquaman star. 'You heard it first, right here with you, baby.'
In Dune Messiah, which takes place 12 years after the events of Dune: Part Two, Idaho is brought back as Hayt, a clone of his former self, and presented to Paul.
When asked if his role in the third film would follow the trajectory his character took in the books, Momoa turned coy, but didn't appear to be upset that he may have revealed a spoiler.
'Well, I'm not sure if I'm going to get in trouble or not, but it's the same thing like Game of Thrones, you know what I mean?' Momoa said.
'If you didn't read the books, it's not my fault, right? Yeah, there's going to be … I'm going to be coming back.'
Reports from April 2024 stated that the third film, still untitled, was already in development. In February this year, reports said shooting was expected to begin this summer, but June was considered too early with a mid-late summer start seen as more feasible.
Zendaya is likely to return as Chani, but production will likely have to work around her busy 2025 schedule, which includes Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, a fourth Spider-Man film and Euphoria season 3.
The epic adaptation has proven a huge hit for the director and Warner Bros, with Dune: Part Two earning over $700m (£555m) worldwide and five Oscar nominations.
In February 2024, even before the release of Dune: Part Two, Villeneuve shared that the third film would be his final instalment in the franchise.
The director said in December 2023 that Dune Messiah was 'being written right now', adding: 'The screenplay is almost finished but it is not finished. It will take a little time … There's a dream of making a third movie … it would make absolute sense to me.'
Momoa revealed in 2021 that he snuck an Easter egg into the first film in tribute to his son. Idaho's martial arts moves were heavily inspired by the Filipino national martial art of Kali.
In an interview with IndieWire, Momoa said that he 'never really learned' the martial art style prior to Dune, though his son knew it well.
'My son does that,' Momoa said. 'There's definitely these intimate moments where I'm signalling to my son. That's a Kali move, where you put your hand on your heart and put it on your head. That's to Timothée in the movie, but that's to my son in real life.'
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Warners began to worry that the relatively untested film-maker was not the right man for the job, not least because he and Miller had considerably different ideas as to what the picture should be. (The idea of casting then-popular teen idol Freddie Prinze Jr as Batman, in an attempt to bring in the younger crowd, was not great.) They scrapped the project and, after briefly toying with the idea of a family-friendly Batman picture based on the animated series Batman Beyond, decided to retain the idea of hiring an auteur director and using a Miller-influenced storyline, but without the overwhelming darkness (and R-rating) that Aronofsky seemed desperate to bring to the project. Enter Christopher Nolan. At the beginning of 2003, the director had just made Warners the successful crime picture Insomnia, and his American debut with the chronology-warping thriller Memento in 2000 was beloved by cinephiles and critics alike. 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Nolan remarked that 'I'm not a real big fan of comic book movies generally because I felt like I really wanted to see a film that conveys the experience of reading a comic book…The only time I have seen a film do the right thing was the 1978 Superman film that Richard Donner directed. They treated that film like an epic scaled film and this amazing cast like Marlon Brando and Gene Hackman and Ned Beatty and Glenn Ford. I thought that was a spectacular film and I felt that Batman deserved that type of storytelling.' In terms of other progenitors, Nolan cited Lawrence of Arabia as a major influence on the film's scope, as well as the comic book story The Man Who Falls, which followed Bruce Wayne's international travels before he became Batman. Yet an even greater influence came in the form of one of his favourite films, Blade Runner, which would define his version of Gotham City. The director commented that Ridley Scott's classic was 'an interesting lesson on the technique of exploring and describing a credible universe that doesn't appear to have any boundaries.' Nolan would also pay homage to that picture by casting its antagonist Rutger Hauer in a small but important role as William Earle, Bruce Wayne's apparent mentor and CEO of his company Wayne Enterprises, who turns out to be a cold-hearted villain. The director soon assembled an impressive cast, which mixed well-respected character actors like Michael Caine (who would go on to become a regular collaborator) and Morgan Freeman with lesser-known but brilliant stars like Tom Wilkinson and Ken Watanabe. There were some surprise reversals, too; Gary Oldman, who had cornered the market in villains the previous decade, played the noble and decent Lieutenant Gordon, whereas Liam Neeson, who was then best known for playing inspiring mentors, was cast as the film's surprise villain Ra's al Ghul, head of the League of Shadows and bent on Gotham's destruction. The only relatively weak link was Katie Holmes as Wayne's childhood friend Rachel Dawes; her romantic involvement with Tom Cruise would attract a great deal of interest around the time of the film's release. Yet the most vital piece of casting – which had defeated Schumacher, and led to Burton being abused – was that of Wayne and Batman. Get it right, and the film would be a triumph. Get it wrong, and everyone might as well pack up and go home. The shortlist for actors considered for the role included Jake Gyllenhaal, Henry Cavill, Josh Hartnett and Hugh Dancy. None were quite right. Nolan was keen on Cillian Murphy but decided that he was better suited to the role of the film's secondary antagonist, Dr Jonathan Crane aka 'Scarecrow'; the two would go on to make another five films together. The other serious contenders for the role were Eion Bailey, a little-known American actor who had had small roles in Fight Club and Almost Famous, and Christian Bale, who had begun his acting career as a child in Spielberg's Empire of the Sun and had since worked steadily, mainly in supporting roles in mid-budget studio films. Neither were obvious choices, but Bailey had the advantage that he was the same nationality as the character he was playing. Yet Bale had two factors in his favour. Firstly, his most iconic role to date was his yuppie serial killer Patrick Bateman in Mary Harron's adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis' zeitgeist-baiting novel American Psycho. As Bateman, he could convincingly manifest suavity, charm, narcissism and psychosis, and did so while appearing to disappear completely into the role. And shortly before he did his screen test for Batman, he lost (and then regained) a frightening amount of weight to shoot Brad Anderson's thriller The Machinist, in which he was unrecognisable from Bateman. He certainly didn't appear to be an obvious choice for Batman. But as Nolan told the BBC: 'You need an actor like Christian who has sufficient intensity and focus in his eyes to make you believe in the idea that somebody without superpowers – and Bruce Wayne has no superpowers – could, through sheer force of will, change himself into a superhero.' When Bale was cast, Nolan announced that 'What I see in Christian is the ultimate embodiment of Bruce Wayne. He has exactly the balance of darkness and light that we were looking for.' All the same, when Batman Begins began filming in London, Chicago and Iceland in March 2004 under the codename The Intimidation Game, it was by no means a guaranteed success. Nolan had a budget of $150 million – more than treble what Insomnia had cost – and while the cast consisted of strong actors, there was no A-list figure in the cast. Burton's Batman had hired Jack Nicholson as the Joker to assuage worries about the lesser-known Keaton, and Nicholson had promptly walked away with the picture. There would be no room for such a flamboyant star performance in Nolan's grittier, more grounded vision. Yet a potentially greater worry was that there was no well-known antagonist to boast in the marketing; no Joker, no Riddler, no Penguin. The Scarecrow and Ra's al Ghul were well-known and loved by comic book fans, but they were deep cuts rather than audience-pleasers. And while Raimi's first and second Spider-Man films boasted copious heart and humour, Nolan and Goyer's intense, bleak script was full of psychological torment for its protagonist. Finally, Bruce Wayne doesn't even become Batman until the film is halfway through. Would audiences be sufficiently interested in Nolan's new world, and Bale's conflicted character, to come in the quantities that they needed to? After a hassle-free production (a Nolan speciality), the film had some successful test screenings at the beginning of 2005, which convinced a trepidatious studio that they had the best Batman film ever made on their hands. Marketing it therefore became a pleasure, rather than a regrettable necessity. Yet the taint of Batman and Robin hung heavy over the character. When Batman Begins opened in the United States on June 15 2005, it was to a $48.7 million opening weekend, which the box office predictor Box Office Mojo called 'strong but unimpressive by today's instantaneous blockbuster standards' and the Wall Street Journal belittled as 'tepid'. It would later go on to gross $373 million worldwide; undeniably decent, but considerably less than the first Batman picture and roughly on a par with Batman Forever, allowing for inflation. What saved the franchise – and, by extension, Nolan's blockbuster career – were the reviews. America's best-known critic Roger Ebert gave it his maximum score of four out of four, and wrote that it was 'the Batman movie I've been waiting for; more correctly, this is the movie I did not realise I was waiting for.' Most writers assessed the film as a Christopher Nolan picture first and foremost, and saluted it as a clever Trojan horse of an achievement, managing to smuggle in the director's signature concerns – the fractured nature of identity; unorthodox, time-jumping storytelling; ambiguity as to the nature of good and evil – into a summer blockbuster. To be sure, there are touches that feel studio-mandated, such as the casting of Holmes and a slightly cringeworthy moment when Oldman's otherwise dignified Gordon has to pump his arms and shout 'Yes!' in the middle of a climatic action scene. But these are minor cavils. Nolan did not just reinvent the Batman series with Batman Begins, but he set out a new blueprint for what could be done with serious mainstream entertainment. Without it, there would be no Casino Royale or Skyfall, no Star Trek, no Joker. It may not be a wholly satisfying action picture (Nolan would develop his craft over his next few films) but it's that rare thing instead, an intellectually rigorous summer blockbuster. One minor but fiendishly complex idea, expressed by Neeson's villain towards the film's conclusion, is that the murder of Wayne's parents – a scene seen in so many pictures now that it should perhaps be retired from cinema – led to the citizens of Gotham rallying round and thereby postponed its lawful destruction by the League of Shadows for decades. In other words, the trauma that their son suffered for years should be viewed as subservient to the good that it did. This emphasis on an apparently insoluble moral dilemma prefigured much else in Nolan's work, from the high-stakes dream heists of Inception to Oppenheimer's development of the atomic bomb, and it can be found in embryonic form here, too. Nolan was often asked while promoting the film whether he would make a sequel. His stock answer was that he was about to make The Prestige and that 'I enjoyed making this film very much and we try to leave the film very open with a real sense of possibilities in the audiences' mind as they leave the theatre. As far as I doing another film, that will mostly be defined by how people react to this one.' He viewed himself as an independent filmmaker, rather than a go-to blockbuster director (he had turned down the chance to direct Troy, for instance) and did not want to be typecast as 'the Batman dude'. Yet Batman Begins ends with a particularly delicious tease, as Gordon shows Batman a playing card with a joker on it and says 'Now, take this guy. Armed robbery, double homicide, has a taste for the theatrical, like you. Leaves a calling card.' The hint at what would come three years later, in all its delicious, dark glory, was tantalising in the extreme. Most would agree that the results surpassed all expectations.
