Dame Judi Dench thinks all the James Bond actors were “pretty dishy”.
Dame Judi Dench fancied all of the James Bond actors
The 89-year-old actress portrayed the head of MI6, M, in eight Bond movies alongside Pierce Brosnan, 71, and Daniel Craig, 56, as Bond, but she doesn’t have a “favourite” and would have loved to have worked with all of them.
Oscar-winner Judi recalled how nervous she and Pierce were on their first 007 film, 1995’s ‘GoldenEye’, admitting she can be hard to work with on a movie set because it’s not somewhere she feels comfortable.
She told Yours magazine: “When I got offered the part of M, my husband said, ‘You’ve got to do it, I’ve always longed to live with a Bond woman.’
There were no more two frightened people in the whole of my career than me and Pierce Brosnan on set on the first day of GoldenEye. We were shaking. I was nervous, as M hadn’t been played by a woman before, and I’m not an easy person on a set as it’s a foreign thing to me.”
Asked if she has a favourite Bond, she replied: “I don’t have a favourite Bond, I thought they were all pretty
dishy. I wouldn’t have minded playing M to all of them.”
The other Bonds were Sir Sean Connery, David Niven, George Lazenby, Sir Roger Moore and Timothy Dalton.
Judi was the first female to play M, and she previously admitted she would welcome a female James Bond.
However, she is unsure if it would be right to still credit the films to author Ian Fleming because if there was a female lead, it would no longer be true to his novels.
Discussing the possibility, she told Saga magazine in 2022: “As things go, that’s fine, but then should you call it, ‘By Ian Fleming’? Who knows.”
Judi insisted she would never have wanted to play Bond herself.
She exclaimed: “Certainly not! I haven’t got the energy to do all that jumping off roofs and onto motorbikes.”
The last two movies in the series, ‘Spectre’ and ‘No Time To Die’ have seen Ralph Fiennes as the new M and Judi insisted it didn’t bother her seeing someone else in the role as it was “high time” for her to pass it on.
Asked her reaction when she saw Ralph as M, Judi – whose eyesight is failing due to macular degeneration – joked: “Well, I can’t see a lot. But I don’t mind hearing someone else in the role.
“They said I cried when I stopped being M – I didn’t. I’d done it eight times; it was high time someone else had a go…
“I’m terribly fond of all that time doing Bond.”
Pierce Brosnan is an Irish actor, film producer, and activist.