Judi Dench Still Hasn't Seen the Final Cut of 'Cats'

Remember Cats? No joke, the day the first trailer for Tom Hooper’s nightmarish adaptation of the classic musical drop is one of my favourite ever days as a pop culture writer. It was a magnificent cavalcade of shock, bafflement, and memes. We had so many questions and very few answers. And that was before we learned about the butthole cut. Cats was a big box office flop, the most critically reviled film of 2019, and a cautionary tale that has kept Hooper in director’s jail for years (he’s gotten out recently and is reportedly directing a film about Rosalind Franklin with Natalie Portman. Let’s hope there aren’t dozens of VFX workers on that project for him to berate. Allegedly.) Most of the people who worked on Cats have been suitably mocking in their assessments. Dame Judi Dench, a classy lady, has a good reason for not giving it a bad review: she’s never seen the final cut.

In her new memoir, Is It Too Late To Make a Run For It?, Dench talks about the movie, where she plays Old Deuteronomy, the cat who gets to decide which of the singing and dancing felines dies and is reborn into a better life. In one scene, she scissors the air with delight after hearing Ian McKellen talk about his fading stardom as a theatre cat with palsy. I was quite drunk by that point in my theatrical experience but boy is that moment seared into my memory.

“Oh God, I can’t bear it - and [Lloyd Webber] had waited so long for it to be made,” she wrote (via Variety.) “What a waste of all that goodwill and talent. I understand the critics were rather hostile to the film. I never saw the final cut so I can’t judge. All I’ll say is nobody sets out to give a poor performance or make a bad film. You do your best, offer something up and hope that people will get on board and join the party.”

Dench was nominated for a Razzie award for her performance, but lost to Rebel Wilson for the same movie, wherein she plays Jennyanydots, the cat who eats cockroaches with human faces and zips off her skin to reveal a cigarette girl dancer outfit underneath.

“Sometimes things just don’t work out: the timing’s wrong, the cast don’t gel, the elements don’t coalesce,” she wrote. “But people’s intentions are mostly honorable. There were no villains in the making of Cats. And if something isn’t a success, then there are always things you can say you’ve learnt.”

This is all a very dutiful way to talk about a legendary flop. I respect it. I have a problem with actors who immediately throw their colleagues, especially below-the-line tech crew, under the bus to make themselves seem in on the joke. Remember when Wilson and James Corden took the piss out of the film’s special effects at the Oscars, after months of hearing about Hooper being an alleged bully and ill-informed director to the overworked VFX team? Honestly, I do think there is a villain in Cats and it’s Hooper. He was a poor fit for the job and tried to reverse-engineer a classy Oscar darling by making a surreal dance musical into a hyper-real celeb-fest with a conventional narrative that looks, sounds, and feels like crap.

But without him, we wouldn’t have an extremely fun film for drunken heckling. Dame Judi, get out the gin and treat yourself to the carnage.