Timothée Chalamet is one of the major Oscar contenders at the 2026 Academy Awards, and it isn’t his first time. This year, Chalamet is nominated for Best Actor and Best Picture for his work and Marty Supreme, but he’s previously been recognized for both biopic work (A Complete Unknown) and a daring indie (Call Me by Your Name). Chalamet also took a run at the Oscars with Denis Villeneuve’s blockbuster film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune – specifically the second film, Dune: Part Two.
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After the 2026 Oscars are done, Chalamet’s next slate of films will include Dune: Part Three, which has been shooting since July. As the awards ceremony approaches, Chalamet is doing a final run of press events, and he’s sharing some early details about Dune 3 – namely that it will be his last time appearing in the series.
Timothée Chalamet appeared on a special called “A CNN & Variety Town Hall Event: Timothée Chalamet and Matthew McConaughey”, which aired over the weekend. During the interview, the actor wouldn’t discuss Dune 3 plot details, but did share details about the experience of making the film. It was during that reflection on how film Dune 3 was different from the other two that Chalamet let it be known that this is officially the end for him:
“I didn’t want to be complacent about a single moment. Everything was sacred, and it was my last time doing a Dune film, so I really wanted to treat it as sacred. Because people can get complacent, but I was more intense on the third one. It felt like that was the natural momentum, so I wanted to push against that as hard as I could.”
The story of Dune: Part Three will be based on the second book in Frank Herbert’s series, Dune Messiah. In the original novel, Chalamet’s character, the “chosen one,” Paul “Muad’Dib” Atreides, has been ruling as both galactic emperor and the messiah of the Fremen people for over a decade. In that time, Paul has weaponized the Fremen as his own army of religious zealots, who are hellbent on spreading their jihad across the galaxy. This leads to the various factions of the empire – the Bene Gesserit, the Spacing Guild, and the bio-engineering masters, the Tleilaxu – all conspiring to remove Paul from power and/or kill him. Paul’s own house begins to fracture when his chosen wife, Princess Irulan, and his Fremen true love, Chani, have a silent war over Paul and the future of the Atreides bloodline. It all culminates in a major skirmish that settles the balance of power in the galaxy once and for all.
Shooting Dune 3 certainly had to be a different kind of experience for the cast: the story of Dune Messiah is invariably tied to some of the craziest sci-fi concepts that Herbert imagined, and set the stage for an even wilder story that follows in the third book, Children of Dune. That includes a subplot in which Planet Arrakis is terraformed back into a lush terrain, while Paul and the members of his family line begin a process of physically bonding with the spice and sandworms of the planet, to become something far beyond human. While Herbert’s stories of Paul’s children and his sister (seen birthed in Dune: Part Two) can continue in a sort of soft reboot of the film franchise, Timothée Chalamet doesn’t seem like he’ll be hanging around to play out Paul’s arc in Children of Dune. And, given the arc of the story and the setting (years and years later), he shouldn’t have to: at that point, recasting would be fine.
As for Dune: Part Three, Chalamet is teasing that the bigger scope and wilder sci-fi concepts will be worthy of the big screen when Villeneuve is done. “Especially on this third one, all the great sh*t you see on screen is from freedom of movement and freedom of choice,” Chalamet explained. “And with Denis, we really had a good rhythm. It’s the eeriest one. It’s a big swing.”
Dune: Part Three has a release date of December 18th. Discuss the film with us over at the ComicBook Forum!
