Why Judi Dench refused to watch the movie she waited 75 years to make: “What’s it like?”
Conventional wisdom would suggest that if you’ve waited your entire life for a single opportunity, and it’s captured on camera for posterity, you’d watch it at least once. Evidently, Judi Dench would disagree, since she never got around to seeing the movie she’d dreamed of for seven and a half decades.
Hopefully, she’s got an eidetic memory. Otherwise, she won’t be able to recall and relive every second of the dream production that allowed her to tick another item from her bucket list. Either that, or she views it as the ultimate ‘you had to be there’ moment, since she has no interest in checking it out for herself.
Obviously, actors don’t always watch their own films unless they have to, but a picture of such magnitude would surely be the exception. After all, the Academy Award-winning icon could barely hide her delight at getting the one phone call she’d always wanted, which still wasn’t enough to make her park her arse and sit through it from the first frame to the last.
You’d think that someone of Dench’s calibre and magnitude, one of the all-time greats who’s won almost every major award under the sun, would be long past the point of getting starstruck or becoming overawed, especially in her veteran years. And yet, Clint Eastwood tends to have that effect on everyone.
When the Hollywood icon contacted her to ask if she was interested in playing Annie Hoover in the Leonardo DiCaprio-fronted biopic, J Edgar, she wouldn’t dream of saying no. “When he rang me up, my voice went up several octaves,” she admitted. “I thought, ‘I’ve waited 75 years for this.'”
Despite that, Eastwood’s signature style of working didn’t sit too well with the theatre-honed legend, who confessed that his rapid-fire method of shooting two takes at most was a source of frustration. Still, she got to play a key supporting role in one of his movies, even if it wasn’t one of his best.
Having been so long in the making, common sense dictates that she’d watch it at least once. Instead, Dench avoided J Edgar completely, revealing that she was conflicted by finally getting the chance to work with Eastwood, since her background treading the boards has always meant she can easily point out the flaws in her own work.
“I find it too hard to cope with that idea that you can’t change it,” she told The Guardian. “I love the way in the theatre that you can change it every night.” When asked if the sentiment applied to her long-awaited team-up with the four-time Oscar-winner and face of the revisionist western, Dench confirmed that it did.
“What’s it like?” she asked. “I suppose I should see it.” The answer is that it’s alright; it’s not an actively bad film, but it’s not even remotely close to being counted among the upper echelons of either Dench or Eastwood’s filmographies. On the plus side, her 75-year-in-the-making dream became a reality, so it doesn’t really matter if she watched it or not.
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