The bizarre role Judi Dench would love to play: “I always say to my agent”
She’s played Ophelia. She’s played the top dog at MI6. She’s won an Oscar. She’s played an elderly cat in spandex. She’s sparred with Clint Eastwood and swooned over Idris Elba. In her nearly seven-decade career, Judi Dench has achieved quite a lot. Now in her 90s, she has a redoubtable body of work to gaze back upon with satisfaction.
Since the beginning of her career, Dench has avoided being pigeonholed. She was once told by a director that she didn’t have a face for movies, but she’s been proving him wrong ever since. After her early career as a Shakespearean actor on the British stage, she moved into television, winning a Bafta on the way. When she began making movies, she appeared in everything from period dramas to major franchises. While many other actors her age were retiring (either by choice or by default), Dench only seemed to pick up steam, appearing in no fewer than eight films between 2011 and 2012 when she was nearing 80.
Despite all of these credits, the accolades, and the variety, Dench has yet to perform one role. It’s something she’s been thinking about for a while now, and, like Helen Mirren’s ongoing obsession with the fact that Kurt Cobain will never know the joys of GPS navigation, it comes up a lot in interviews. In a 2022 conversation with The Sunday Times, for example, Dench took the opportunity to highlight that nagging bit of unfinished business. “I always say to my agent, ‘Can I not play an Afghan woman who learns to walk the tightrope and, at the end, turns into a dragon?’” she said.
Always, Dame Judi? Always? Why does the dragon need to have a particular nationality? And why a tightrope walker? The questions are endless. Does the character become a dragon at the end of the movie or at the end of the tightrope? Would there be a Rocky-style training montage of Dame Judi learning that particular circus trick? Would she do her own stunts? And most importantly… Why?
She wasn’t kidding when she implied that she’d been chatting to her agent about it for a while. Way back in 2016, she told Time Out that it had been on her mind for quite some time already. “I’ve looked for it for ten years or more,” she said, explaining that it was, in her mind, at least, a play rather than a film.
Based on those comments, we can assume that the tightrope-walking Afghan dragon idea has been knocking around Dame Judi’s head since 2006, at least. We are now nearly two decades from that point, which begs an even more urgent question: what on earth are the playwrights doing?
If you’re an up-and-coming theatre scribe who wants to get their foot in the door, this is the best opportunity out there. No one else is doing it. It’s an open goal. There is no keeper in sight. Now is the time. And if you want to go the extra mile, might I suggest an even greater career opportunity, a story that follows a tightrope walker who turns into an Afghan dragon who becomes the companion of a GPS-wielding Kurt Cobain? Just like that, you’d have two Oscar winners at your disposal.
