Judi Dench is joining the chorus of critics of “The Crown” to speak out against what she called a “cruelly unjust” and “inaccurate and hurtful” fictionalized depiction of the British monarchy going into Season 5’s Nov. 9 premiere.
While maintaining in an open letter to Netflix (via The Times) on Thursdsay that it’s a “brilliant but fictionalised account of events,” the U.K. acting royalty and Oscar winner has gotten wind of “wounding suggestions apparently contained in the new series” that she believes requires an explicit message to viewers that what they’re watching is more fiction than fact.
“I fear that a significant number of viewers, particularly overseas, may take its version of history as being wholly true,” she wrote.
Going into Season 5, which covers the royal family’s inner workings through the 1990s, including Prince Charles’ highly publicized divorce from Princess Diana, Dench cited examples of alleged dramatizations of Charles plotting for his mother to abdicate or of him denouncing Queen Elizabeth II’s parenting as deficient enough to deserve jail time.
“This is both cruelly unjust to the individuals and damaging to the institution they represent,” Dench wrote. “No one is a greater believer in artistic freedom than I, but this cannot go unchallenged.”
“The closer the drama comes to our present times, the more freely it seems willing to blur the lines between historical accuracy and crude sensationalism,” she added.
As such, Dench continued, she believes that while Netflix has publicly stated this week that “The Crown” has always been a “fictionalized drama,” “the program makers have resisted all calls for them to carry a disclaimer at the start of each episode. The time has come for Netflix to reconsider — for the sake of a family and a nation so recently bereaved, as a mark of respect to a sovereign who served her people so dutifully for 70 years, and to preserve their own reputation in the eyes of their British subscribers.”
The debate over whether “The Crown” should include a disclaimer has long been brewing, with culture secretary Oliver Dowden, among others, previously deriding the series for allowing viewers to “mistake fiction for fact.”
Dench is quite familiar with dramatizing the royal family onscreen; her work as Queen Elizabeth I in “Shakespeare in Love” won her a supporting actress Oscar, and she played Queen Victoria in 2017’s “Victoria & Abdul.”
