Ian McKellen visits his longtime friend and collaborator’s home in this cosy, touching comfort watch
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After welcoming Sir Kenneth Branagh to her Surrey home in the first instalment of Tea with Judi Dench, the legendary James Bond actor has another starry houseguest: Sir Ian McKellen.
Dench has shared the stage and screen with the Lord of the Rings star multiple times during their illustrious careers, and they have plenty of awards between them – but in this Sky Arts show, the pair seem like any other regular pals as they sit down to chat over tea and tiffin.
From reminiscing about their early days on stage together, to sharing their honest thoughts on one of their most controversial projects, here are the best bits from the documentary…
McKellen and Dench have shared the stage together countless times, and there’s one moment from early on in his career that The Lord of the Rings actor has never forgotten.
In 1975, the pair were starring in George Bernard Shaw’s comedy Too Good to Be True, with Dench playing a nurse masquerading as a countess and McKellen playing a thief who turned out to be a vicar (Dench’s husband, Michael Williams, was also in the cast).
One night early on in the run, McKellen found himself suffering horrendous, mid-show stage fright after overhearing punters in a pub criticising his performance.
He tells Dench: “I turned my back and gave you a signal, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing, Judi,’ and I don’t know what magic empathy you had; you just took over my lines, and your own lines, and you finished the scene as a monologue. Because I couldn’t speak.
“I was in the depths of stage fright. And you came off, and we didn’t make much of it, and you said, ‘Are you alright, Ian?’ I said, ‘I don’t think I am, it’s just I don’t think they think I’m any good’, and you said, ‘Oh, don’t worry about that, that’ll wear off in time.’ I think that’s all we said. And it did, three months later, I was fine.”
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While many of McKellen and Dench’s collaborations have been lauded by critics, the same sadly can’t be said for all of them. One misstep in particular stands out for the duo: the Cats film.
The pair made brief appearances in Tom Hooper’s catastrophic big-screen adaptation, with McKellen playing Gus the Theatre Cat and Dench appearing as a gender-swapped Old Deuteronomy, who sings the final number.
Dench diplomatically says the 2019 film “didn’t quite land with cinema audiences”, before McKellen more bluntly reveals he once “made the mistake” of watching a clip from the movie.
“I didn’t know it was just an extract,” he explains, “and I thought, ‘Oh, well done Ian, that’s really not bad at all.’ And then it said ‘comments’, and I read the comments, but I didn’t get past three; they were all so disapproving. Anyway, there we go.”
