'Dune: Prophecy' Is Another Fantasy with a Brit-Heavy Cast

One of the more difficult decisions Telly Visions has to make is what constitutes a British series and what doesn't. This didn't use to be nearly so tricky: it was created by the BBC and ran on PBS. British. It didn't? Probably not British. However, Game of Thrones changed all that. Not that casting people with British accents as science fiction and fantasy characters wasn't already a thing; however, it was not necessarily a thing that was a de facto requirement to have your big-budget science fiction/fantasy series read "prestige" until the Dragons and Dirty White People show did it.

Since then, fantasy series have almost wall-to-wall U.K. actors, from Anton Lesser in Andor to Olivia Colman in Secret Invasion. Both of those series, which stream on Disney+, are not British in the slightest, but you wouldn't know it from reading the cast list.

The new Dune films and the forthcoming TV spinoff Dune: Prophecy were both borderline cases, though Dune's focus on colonialism, especially in the second film, took it over the line to being "British-ish" enough to register. Dune: Prophecy also has that going for it, but it was the realization that the cast did not only feature future dames Emily Watson (Little Women) and Olivia Williams (The Crown) as the leads but also cast multiple Bridgerton alumni that made it enough that it seemed fitting to at least cover who's who in the series.