Dame Judi Dench and Sir Ian McKellen may be an appointed dame and knight, respectively, but that doesn’t mean that don’t get into trouble sometimes.
On the Graham Norton Show Monday night, McKellen admitted that he and Dench were up to no good after a Buckingham Palace dinner with the Queen. The evening was, McKellen said “a very posh occasion,” where he even sat next to Princess Margaret. As the night wound down, the actor and actress found themselves wandering around the palace’s historic halls. Until they entered a room that seemed . . . familiar, because it was—Dench and Kellen had both been knighted there years earlier. “I think this is the throne room—where you were made a dame and I was made a knight,” McKellen recalls telling Dench.
But there were no thrones in sight, so the two decided to do some exploring. Then, they stumbled upon Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip’s gilded chairs. “We went on dancing around the corner, and we found ourselves behind the band, and there behind this sort of partition was the throne. So we sat on them,” McKellen said.
“It brings out on the worst of you, Buckingham Palace,” he added.
That’s not the only time the actor has gotten in trouble—he also revealed that once, a security guard confronted him after he smoked a cigarette on the famous balcony, from which the royal family usually waves.
“I’m there looking down The Mall and suddenly there’s a minor search light,” McKellan said. “Below is a policeman saying, ‘Sir Ian, don’t forget you’re in Buckingham Palace.’”