The ‘Star Wars’ movie that almost brought Judi Dench back to sci-fi: “Would have been great”
In her long, storied, and decorated career, Judi Dench has only appeared in a solitary sci-fi movie, and even at that, she didn’t have a fucking clue what it was about.
The only reason she agreed to lend her gravitas to 2004’s The Chronicles of Riddick was because Vin Diesel wooed her into doing it, and the entire time she was on the set, the Academy Award-winning legend didn’t even bother to try and wrap her head around the nonsensical space opera.
She literally said, “I never quite knew what was going on,” which is probably for the best, since it was crap. Then again, Dench is fully aware that it’s crap without having ever laid eyes on the finished article, and when it was once brought up in her presence, she intimated that she’d rather pretend it didn’t exist.
If anything, dragging celebrated Shakespearean actors into blockbuster fantasy flicks to try and drag a script up to their level has become a tale as old as time: there’s Dench in Riddick, Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart in numerous X-Men movies, Ralph Fiennes in those Clash of the Titans things, Anthony Hopkins in Transformers: The Last Knight, and on it goes.
As has constantly proven to be the case in the big-budget arena, George Lucas was ahead of the curve on that one, too, recruiting Alec Guinness, Peter Cushing, Ian McDiarmid, Julian Glover, and Michael Pennington, among others, for the original Star Wars trilogy. Three decades later, Dench could have joined them.
Having worked with Daisy Ridley on Kenneth Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express, the diminutive dame had an easy route into a galaxy far, far away. As it happened, concept art from 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker showed the former’s Rey conversing with a character who was supposed to be played by Dench.
“Dame Judi Dench was on the wish-list for the role, and would have been great,” concept artist Phil Saunders explained. “Rey finds her on yet another desert planet, of course, and her home would have been carved into the top of a spectacular mesa.” Somewhere along the way, though, those plans were dropped.
The sequel trilogy was peppered with big-name cameos, most of whom were obscured from view, with everyone from Tom Hardy and Daniel Craig to Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Simon Pegg swinging by across the three films, but for whatever reason, JJ Abrams abandoned those plans to have one of the greatest British actors of all time hop aboard the Star Wars bandwagon.
Would Dench have agreed to do it, were she offered the role? Probably, since she was in a Pirates of the Caribbean film for a few seconds and decided that Artemis Fowl was something worth her time, but since it didn’t come together, The Chronicles of Riddick remains her one and only excursion into sci-fi.
