The onscreen death that left Judi Dench indignant: “How dare they?”
Not every actor wants to be Danny Trejo, Sean Bean, or John Hurt and become synonymous with dying onscreen, but that doesn’t mean they want to be John Wayne, Arnold Schwarzenegger, or Tom Cruise, who rarely, if ever, get their clogs popped. Judi Dench has been bumped off a few times, but there was one occasion that left her particularly indignant.
It’s almost impossible for any performer to go through their entire career without being killed at least once, whether it’s on stage or in film and television. It’s one of those nearly unavoidable facts of life, with the Academy Award-winning dame and foul-mouthed force of nature being shuffled off her mortal coil a number of times in a variety of different ways.
That said, most of Dench’s demises have happened offscreen. The first time she didn’t make it to the end credits was in a 1979 performance of Macbeth that aired on television, with her second, third, and fourth deaths also being off-camera. It was almost a strange quirk, until she made up for lost time with the one that left her indignant.
After becoming part of the furniture across an octet of appearances covering two different eras of the franchise, Dench’s number was up when her M was shot in Sam Mendes’ James Bond blockbuster, Skyfall. Slowly bleeding out following the Home Alone-esque finale, she dies in Daniel Craig’s arms to draw a line under her two-decade association with the spy saga.
She would have known it was coming from the second she read the script, but that didn’t mean she was happy about it. “I absolutely loved it,” she said of her tenure. “But I’d have liked to have been running along the rooftop a bit, and things. Never mind. I sat in an office. I appeared in eight Bond films in all, but they decided to kill me off. How dare they?”
Realistically, there was nothing stopping Dench from hanging around for Spectre and No Time to Die, but the creative team clearly thought the cast needed freshening up. Unfortunately, that left Dench on the chopping block, but at least she did get to play an important part in an explosive action scene before bowing out as M, even if she didn’t get to realise her dream of sprinting across the rooftops like a smaller, older Tom Cruise.
It was an unsung milestone in the decorated veteran’s career because it doubled as the first time her character’s death had been filmed and shown onscreen. However, despite its emotional impact, it’s arguably not her most memorable expiration, and not just because it’s one of only two that audiences actually got to see.
Admittedly, it’s 50/50 as to which one anybody prefers, but what’s better: Dench being shot and slowly dying from a bullet wound in Skyfall, or her Esmeralda Avocet being pulled out of a window and eaten by a monster in Tim Burton’s Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children while a gaggle of teenagers watch on and recoil in horror?
