Judi Dench Calls on Netflix to Add Disclaimer to 'The Crown' as Fiction: 'This Cannot Go Unchallenged'

POOL Tim Graham Picture Library/Getty Dame Judi Dench and Queen Elizabeth

Dame Judi Dench is calling for a change to The Crown.

The Oscar-winning actress said in a letter to The Times published Wednesday that Netflix should add a disclaimer to the royal drama, which returns for its fifth season next month, advertising itself as a "fictionalized drama."

"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, 87, said.

"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," Dench continued. "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 concluded, "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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In December 2020, Netflix said it had no plans to add a disclaimer to The Crown after U.K. politician Oliver Dowden requested they do so.

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"We have always presented The Crown as a drama and we have every confidence our members understand it's a work of fiction that's broadly based on historical events," the streaming service said in a statement, according to The Guardian. "As a result we have no plans, and see no need, to add a disclaimer."

Princess Diana's brother, Charles, the 9th Earl Spencer, also spoke out about the show, agreeing that a warning for viewers is needed. He told a U.K. morning show that Netflix and the producers should be "honest with the consumer."

"I think it would help The Crown an enormous amount if at the beginning of each episode it stated that 'this isn't true but it is based around some real events,'" he said on the Lorraine show on ITV. "Because then everyone would understand it's a drama for drama's sake."

Spencer added, "This is a hugely globally significant series, and for any movie that does this, you know, it's playing fast and loose with history without saying that . . . You just have to be honest with the consumer."

"I worry people do think that this is gospel, and that's unfair. If we buy something in the supermarket we can look on the packet and see what we are getting," he continued.

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Elizabeth Debicki, who portrays Princess Diana in the show's fifth and sixth seasons, told Entertainment Weekly that show creator Peter Morgan is depicting the stories of real-life people with careful thought.

"Peter and the entire crew of this job do their utmost to really handle everything with such sensitivity and truth and complexity, as do actors," the actress said. "The amount of research and care and conversations and dialogue that happen over, from a viewer's perspective, something probably that you would never ever notice is just immense. From that very first meeting [with] Peter, I knew that I'd entered into this space where this was taken seriously [in] a deeply caring way. So that's my experience of the show."