The flowers got there before Vin Diesel did, and they never made it past the stage door. He’d sent a bouquet ahead to the Haymarket Theatre, where Judi Dench was performing, before coming in person to ask her into The Chronicles of Riddick.
“I’m cheap as chips, me. Far too easily wooed.” — Judi Dench
“They couldn’t get them up the stairs to my dressing room, so they had to leave them at the stage door,” she writes in her memoir Is It Too Late to Make a Run for It?, told to Brendan O’Hea. “They were easily the length of a kayak. And as wide.”
Dench signed on to the 2004 sci-fi film as Aereon, the mysterious alien ambassador. “You can’t say no to a man like that, can you?” she says.