Judi Dench Calls Out ‘The Crown’ for “Cruelly Unjust” Season 5: “This Cannot Go Unchallenged”

Dame Judi Dench is appalled by The Crown, and is calling for Netflix to add a content disclaimer to the British royal family drama. Dench condemned the latest season of The Crown in an op-ed published in the U.K. outlet The Times, in which she blasted the show’s depictions of the royal family as “cruelly unjust,” per Variety.

Dench’s letter comes just weeks before new episodes of The Crown premiere on Netflix. The latest season of the show is set in the ’90s, during Prince Charles (Dominic West) and Princess Diana’s (Elizabeth Debicki) divorce, as heavily featured in teasers for Season 5.

The Crown tells the story of the royals through the decades, starting with Queen Elizabeth II’s early days and continuing chronologically to more recent eras of the monarchy. In her op-ed, Dench accused The Crown of straying further from reality as the show inches nearer to current events.

“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,” she wrote.

Dench also called out specific plot points in the new season, adding, “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.”

She insisted, “No one is a greater believer in artistic freedom than I, but this cannot go unchallenged.”

Dench then called out The Crown creators for how they’ve presented the series, arguing the label of “fictionalized drama” isn’t sufficient.

“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 wrote. “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.”

Dench is the latest figure to speak out against The Crown‘s new season. The royals themselves are reportedly upset by the show and also want a disclaimer from Netflix.

An anonymous “senior royal source” told The Telegraph last month that the royals wanted clarification that The Crown is a “drama, not a documentary,” while an unnamed friend to King Charles III slammed the show as “exploitative,” accusing Netflix of having “no qualms about mangling people’s reputations.”

Netflix has previously pushed back against requests for a Crown disclaimer, saying in 2020, “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. As a result we have no plans — and see no need — to add a disclaimer.”

The Crown Season 5 premieres Nov. 9 on Netflix.