Judi Dench recalls first meeting with Pierce Brosnan

IANS

Veteran star Judi Dench, who first stepped into the world of James Bond in 1995 with Golden Eye, went down memory lane and recalled her first meeting with the ‘adorable’ actor Pierce Brosnan.

Dench played the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service known as ‘M’ in the movie, a role she held in each of the subsequent films in the James Bond franchise, until Spectre in 2015. When Dench saw her co-star Brosnan on the Golden Eye set, she couldn’t help but notice his good looks.

“Be still, beating heart,” she said, clasping her hands over her chest when asked about the James Bond icon. She added: “He was just an adorable man. He was absolutely glorious to work with, and as a person.”

Both Dench and Brosnan were nervous on the first day of shooting the Bond film. “His first day on Bond was my first day too. But he was Bond! Both of us, I think, were pretty jumpy.”

Dench also recalls one day when she brought her daughter, Finty, to the set. “She walked out of my dressing room as Pierce was coming in. She was like a cartoon person... miming her eyes popping out of her head. I’ve never seen anything like it,” she says.

Filming the Bond films didn’t always give Dench a sense of the action going on, since she only came to the set to shoot her scenes. That’s in contrast to her work on stage. When the Royal Shakespeare Company performed at the legendary Old Vic, she would often stand in the wings and watch the rest of the show just to get a taste of the magic of performing in front of a live audience.

“I would go in, and I would do the day’s filming for Bond, perhaps, but then I wasn’t part of the rest)” Dench, who recently co-authored the new book, Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent, recalled.