Judi Dench took “birthday suit” to a different level when she accidentally FaceTimed a pal while naked on his special day.
The Belfast actress, 88, recalled the embarrassing moment during an appearance on BBC Radio 2’s The Zoe Ball Breakfast Show on Wednesday, November 22. Dench explained that after her daughter, Finty Williams, reminded her of their pal Chris Logan’s birthday, she decided to call him from the bathtub.
“So, I picked up my phone and I said, ‘Chris, Happy Happy’… and I just saw these two people turn and [make shocked faces],” Dench said of the moment.
What was meant to be a simple phone call turned into Dench unknowingly giving the birthday boy a glimpse of her nude body in the tub. “Well, it was FaceTiming them,” Dench continued. “I don’t know about FaceTime. Poor Chris … happy birthday!”
Host Zoe Ball joked, “What a birthday message! You can’t top that, though, can you?”
Dench let out a laugh and explained that she “can’t see at all” due to her age-related macular degeneration. Plus, she revealed, “My phone is anathema to me. I don’t know what those buttons [are for].”
Dench has been open about her macular degeneration diagnosis, telling Reuters in a 2012 statement, “This condition is something that thousands and thousands of people all over the world are having to contend with. It’s something that I have learnt to cope with and adapt to — and it will not lead to blindness.”
Dench insisted at the time that she didn’t want her eye problems to be “overblown.” In the decade that’s followed, she has adapted by learning to memorize her scripts via repetition instead of relying on her photographic memory.
“You find a way of just getting about and getting over the things that you find very difficult,” Dench said during a February 2021 charity event for London’s Vision Foundation. “I’ve had to find another way of learning lines and things, which is having great friends of mine repeat them to me over and over and over again. So I have to learn through repetition, and I just hope that people won’t notice too much if all the lines are completely hopeless!”
Earlier this year, Dench gave an update on her eye health and admitted it has become even more difficult to read her lines back.
“It has become impossible,” she admitted during a February appearance on The Graham Norton Show. “And because I have a photographic memory, I need to find a machine that not only teaches me my lines but also tells me where they appear on the page.”
While Dench’s new memorization process has posed some challenges, it hasn’t completely deterred her from working in entertainment. She told the Daily Mirror’s Notebook magazine in July that she plans to work “as much as I can” with or without the ability to fully see on a film set.
