Chani

Chani opens the movie, narrating how the Harkonnens exploit the spice and treat her people with cruelty. When House Harkonnen leaves without explanation, she doesn't celebrate: she only asks who their next oppressors will be.

For the rest of the story, Chani shows up in Paul's visions, always in the desert, as if he already knew her.

Chani is among Stilgar's Fremen who find Paul and Jessica after the fall of the Atreides. She watches the duel in which Paul kills Jamis and, when the tribe accepts the two outsiders, walks beside him. She tells him this is only the beginning.

Chani fights the Harkonnens in the movie's opening and is put in charge of teaching Paul to live like a Fremen: walking without rhythm on the sand, hiding from ornithopters, surviving on the body's own water. With her friend Shishakli, she makes it clear the northern fighters aren't waiting for any savior.

During the harvester raids, the two grow close. She watches Paul ride a sandworm for the first time.

Chani distrusts the legend of the Lisan al Gaib from the start. To her, the prophecy was planted by outsiders to control the Fremen, and seeing Jessica preach among the southern fundamentalists only confirms her fear. She loves Paul precisely because he says he wants to fight alongside the Fremen, not rule over them.

Feyd-Rautha's attack on Sietch Tabr kills Shishakli. When Paul drinks the Water of Life and falls into a coma in the south, Chani mixes her own tears with the Water of Life and wakes him. But the man who wakes up is someone else. At the southern war council, he embraces the role of the messiah she feared.

After the victory over the Emperor, Paul demands to marry Irulan and launches the holy war. Chani refuses to kneel, leaves alone, calls a sandworm and rides off into the desert.

Zendaya returns as Chani in Dune: Part Three, which opens on December 18, 2026 and adapts the novel Dune Messiah, with Timothée Chalamet back as Paul.

In Frank Herbert's novel, Chani is the daughter of the planetologist Liet-Kynes, a man, and a Fremen woman, and she believes in Paul almost from the start, without the distrust of Villeneuve's movies. She has a son with Paul, Leto, who dies in a Sardaukar raid. In the end she agrees to remain his concubine while Paul marries Irulan for politics, and Jessica comforts her by saying history will call them wives. There's no ride off on a sandworm like the one that closes Part Two.