Dench took Branagh’s breath away in ‘Belfast’
A couple of years ago, Kenneth Branagh was driving to Judi Dench’s Surrey home to read her his screenplay and offer her the role of the grandmother for “Belfast,” his personal story about growing up in Northern Ireland in the 1960s during the sectarian strife of the Troubles.
Dench and Branagh have worked together now 12 times, so there’s a shorthand and familiarity between them, a connection that Dench chalks up to them almost sharing a December birthday (”many years apart,” the 87-year-old Dench notes).
Still, Branagh, 61, remains a bit in awe of Dench, still remembering what it was like when he first worked with her on a 1987 BBC production of Ibsen’s “Ghosts” and he couldn’t quite fathom that this legend, this Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, was actually taking him seriously. (“Or at least she was doing a wonderful performance of treating me like an equal operator,” Branagh says, smiling.)
Thus, Branagh’s “Belfast” reading for Dench felt like an audition, like he was coming to Dench with his “pack on his back.” And as he was acting out the movie and putting every ounce of energy he had into the reading, in his mind, Branagh was picturing Dench sitting across from him, stroking a blue-eyed Persian cat like the Bond villain Blofeld, and saying, “So, Mr. Branagh … you really think this is a movie …”
“She has a very healthy, a very rigorous, and I would say savage, artistic judgment and artistic conscience,” Branagh says. He’s seated on a sofa in a London hotel room, and Dench is next to him. And when she hears Branagh’s description of her acumen, she bristles.
“I certainly don’t believe ‘savage,’ ” Dench says, frowning.
“I mean ‘savage’ in terms of rigorous,” Branagh, chastened, offers, walking the word back a bit.
Dench turns to him. “Was I savage when I gave you notes for ‘Much
Ado About Nothing?’ ” Branagh casts his eyes downward. He knows where this is headed. “Well …” he begins. But she cuts him off. “You wouldn’t stay for the notes!”
“We have had our run-ins about these kinds of things,” Branagh says. He circles back to his verbal trespass. “I would say ‘savagery’ in terms of being an artistic Puritan.” Dench nods, satisfied. “That is much nicer.” Branagh laughs. “Well, it’s in the same world!”
The whole hour-long conversation goes like this. I’ll ask a question, and the genial Branagh will answer with a polite earnestness, enunciating every word with peerless precision. And then Dench will tease him or correct the record or say something to make him laugh.
It has been this way between them from the beginning, since that longago production of “Ghosts.”
The woman Dench plays in “Belfast” is modelled after Branagh’s grandmother, although it’s clear she isn’t far removed from Dench herself in her directness, fortitude and capacity for humour. “Jude,” as Branagh often calls her, shared many scenes with Jude Hill, the young actor (he was10 at the time of filming) playing Buddy, Branagh’s precocious stand-in. “The two Judes,” Branagh calls them. “Young Jude and slightly less young Jude.”
“Decrepit Jude,” Dench says, laughing.
It’s no surprise, given their history and her standing, that Branagh chose to end “Belfast” with a closeup of Dench. They did 12 takes, patiently working together to make each one a bit different until Branagh knew Dench nailed it. He went back to double-check the take and, listening to it, heard a strange noise. Branagh asked the sound mixer what happened. “That’s your intake of breath,” he was told.
“She was so bloody good, she had literally taken my breath away,” Branagh says.
Dench lets out a hearty laugh. “We kept working, didn’t we?” she asks Branagh. “We didn’t settle. Never settle.”