English actress Dame Judi Dench has a thing or two to say about Netflix’s The Crown. In an open letter to The Times UK, the Academy Award-winning actress slammed the series for its “cruelly unjust” depiction of the British royal family.
Dame Judi Dench made a name for herself in film by playing one of Britain’s most well-known queens in Shakespeare in Love, Queen Elizabeth I, a role for which she won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Now, just ahead of The Crown’s fifth season debut on Netflix this November, the actress has penned an open letter to The Times UK saying that the show’s depiction of the British royal family is “cruelly unjust” and should include a disclaimer to viewers that the show is a fictionalized account of historic events (although Princess Di’s wedding dress was pretty darn accurate). The fifth season of the series is set to cover the 1990s, a period that includes some of the most tabloid-grabbing years of the royal family, including the bitter divorce between Prince Charles (Dominic West) and Princess Diana (Elizabeth Debicki).
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“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,” Dench’s letter reads. “Given some of the wounding suggestions apparently contained in the new series — that King Charles plotted for his mother to abdicate, for example, or once suggested his mother’s parenting was so deficient that she might have deserved a jail sentence — this is both cruelly unjust to the individuals and damaging to the institution they represent. No one is a greater believer in artistic freedom than I, but this cannot go unchallenged.”
“Despite this week stating publicly 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,” Dench continues. “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.”
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Netflix’s The Crown Disclaimer Debate
Netflix
Netflix does not currently include a disclaimer on each episode of The Crown, and the streamer has long maintained that the series is “presented as a drama based on historical events.” However, in November 2020, UK Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden spoke out about the need for Netflix to add a disclaimer to show so that people would know that it was a work of fiction.
“It’s a beautifully produced work of fiction, so as with other TV productions, Netflix should be very clear at the beginning it is just that. Without this, I fear a generation of viewers who did not live through these events may mistake fiction for fact,” Dowden said while the fourth season of the show was airing (you can read more about the debate here; it’s a doozy and maybe Britain should care more about factual representation of trans people than factual representation of British royal drama).
Ever since Dowden’s statement, fans have been talking about whether a disclaimer is needed. With the fifth season soon to air and Queen Elizabeth II’s recent death, the debate that has recently reached new heights and Dench is the latest celebrity to comment on it.
