The “uninformed hunch” that led Judi Dench to her worst movie: “That’ll be really good”
Most American cinemagoers got their first inkling of Judi Dench’s greatness sometime in the late 1990s or early 2000s when she seemed to appear in nearly every period drama produced by Miramax. She earned an Oscar for barely appearing in Shakespeare in Love, played a curmudgeonly Frenchwoman in Chocolat, and shot daggers with her eyes as Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest. Meanwhile, she was ordering James Bond around in multiple generations of the 007 franchise.
Long before Dench took Hollywood by storm, however, she was already a national treasure in the UK, and she had shown that she could do a lot more than wear a hoop skirt and look disapproving. She spent the first part of her career earning countless accolades and legend status in the theatre. She could do Shakespeare and Cabaret, heart-rending contemporary dramas and comedies. Although she didn’t take to television and movies very quickly, she started earning Baftas pretty much instantly when she did venture on screen. It seemed like she could excel in any medium and as any character, which is why she’s had one of the longest and most acclaimed careers of any of her peers.
Not all her work could be Iris and Skyfall, though. She’s made so many movies that a few duds are bound to slip through the cracks, and it turns out that it is actually her success that has led to some of her least-watchable films. According to Kenneth Branagh, who has worked with the great thespian many times, he has an ‘uninformed hunch’ (a phrase he attributes to theatre director Peter Brook) that whenever he approaches her with a new project, she will always ask him if the role will be different from the ones she’s already played.
After an Academy Award, a Tony, two Golden Globes, six Baftas, and seven Olivier Awards, such a question is reasonable, but also extremely hard to answer in the affirmative. Dench has done pretty much everything, and the few things she hasn’t done, she probably hasn’t done for a reason. That ‘hasn’t done for a reason’ caveat did not seem to cross Branagh’s mind when he offered her the role of Julius Root in his adaptation of the young adult fantasy novel Artemis Fowl.
If you know anyone named Julius, they are probably male, as was the case with Mr Root. Branagh felt that a gender swap would be just the sort of unique angle that Dench was craving. There have been many great gender swaps in movies — most of them by Tilda Swinton — but they are rarely the thing that is going to make or break the film, and they certainly don’t guarantee a good performance.
Dench really went out on a limb when devising her characterisation for the 802-year-old elf. Unfortunately, Branagh went with her and didn’t let her well-founded doubts get in the way when she thought about scaling back. “When she first started,” he said in an interview with Yahoo, “She went [makes deep grumbling noise] and then she started walking round the room. She didn’t say anything, she just threw the odd line out. A line that she loved from Root was ‘Knock it off!’”
Something about that combination made him think of Napoleon and Winston Churchill, which he thought was pretty spot on. Dench must have realised that it was all a bit silly because she dropped the act and asked him, “Do you think that’ll be any good?” In a fatal error, Branagh replied, “That’ll be really good, keep that!” The movie went straight to streaming.
