Ever since breaking away from its roots as a series of popcorn flicks about illegal street racing, Universal Pictures’ Fast Saga has been stacking its roster with increasingly big-name actors. In a recent interview with MTV International while promoting the franchise’s latest installment, F9, perennial wheelman Vin Diesel indicated that the marquee actor he dreams of adding to the Saga‘s credits for the next outing, Fast & Furious 10, is Academy Award winner Dame Judi Dench.
The choice may seem an unexpected one, but Diesel did work with Dench on his 2004 project The Chronicles of Riddick, in which she played the air elemental Aereon. Beyond their professional connection, Dench also possesses a solid pedigree in spy-fi cinema, having played M across seven James Bond films beginning with Pierce Brosnan’s 1995 GoldenEye and culminating with Daniel Craig’s 2012 Skyfall, in which the then-78-year-old Commander of the Order of the British Empire got a chance to hold her own in a combat situation.
And Dench would only be the latest in the Fast Saga‘s long history of high-profile recruitments. Fast & Furious 4 introduced a pre-Wonder Woman Gal Gadot as former Mossad agent Gisele Yashar, who reappeared in Fast Five as WWE superstar Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson was added to play Diplomatic Security Service agent Luke Hobbs, who in turn reappeared with her in Fast & Furious 6 along with newcomers Luke Evans, playing Owen Shaw, and MMA fighter Gina Carano, playing DSS agent Riley Hicks.
Furious 7 then brought on board action movie mainstay Jason Statham as Shaw’s brother Deckard and Kurt Russell as the enigmatic Mister Nobody, both of whom returned in The Fate of the Furious, which also introduced Charlize Theron as the cyberterrorist Cipher and Dame Helen Mirren in a cameo as the matriarch of the Shaw family. Both of those characters are set to return in F9, which will introduce Johnson’s fellow WWE superstar John Cena as Dom Toretto’s newly-revealed estranged brother Jakob.
Since fully giving itself over to the spy-fi genre, the Fast Saga also hasn’t been shy about expanding its cast internationally with British actors, already featuring the likes of Evans, Statham and Mirren, as well as Idris Elba and Vanessa Kirby as the villainous Brixton Lore and MI6 field agent Hattie Shaw in last year’s Hobbs & Shaw spinoff. And while the joke goes that Britain has a total of twelve actors, six sets, and one tie, the two grand Dames have only appeared side-by-side on screen once, more than half-a-century ago in Peter Hall’s 1968 adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which Mirren played Hermia and Dench played Titania.
Whether Diesel can lure Dench into a reunion with Mirren remains to be seen – the head of the Fast Saga‘s Secret Intelligence Service has yet to be cast, after all – but the debut of Fast & Furious 9 is set for May 22nd, with the franchise’s tenth film premiering April 2nd, 2021.
