The acting greats swap stories at the home of Dame Judi
Year: 2026
Watching actors talk to each other can be very entertaining because they’re trained entertainers, but when they’re also national treasures, well – it becomes something else entirely. Here, Sir Ian McKellen drops in on Dame Judi Dench (or ‘Jude’, as he calls her) and starts by digging back to the play that brought them together – The Promise at Oxford Playhouse in 1966, a Russian play performed by three actors. The third was Ian McShane.
The pair go on to reflect on the moments their careers crossed over after that, swap stories about the theatre, compare awards and take a stroll through her garden, which features a tree named Birnam Wood – a reference to Macbeth or, as Dame Judi calls it, ‘the Scottish play’.
Dench and McKellen were both in a ‘famously intimate’ stage production of Shakespeare’s tragedy back in 1976. It was a pretty intimate affair backstage, too, and McKellen remembers receiving underwear as birthday presents from his castmates, who had noticed his pants had ‘a few too many holes in them’. Their memories of the terrible movie version of Cats are not as warm. ‘I was frightful in the film… Just so you know, I had no control over my CGI ears,’ she recalls. (47 minutes)
