When Prince Andrew invited BBC current affairs show “Newsnight” to interview him at Buckingham Palace in 2019, neither he – nor his interviewer Emily Maitlis – had any inkling that it would not only result in the British royal’s public disgrace, including being stripped of his titles and patronages, but would spawn two dramatizations within five years. (And it’s likely they won’t be the last).
The interview was, to put it plainly, seismic. Not just personally catastrophic for Andrew, who found himself effectively barred from public life after it aired, as well as paying out a multi-million-dollar settlement to his accuser Virginia Giuffre, but reverberated through the royal family all the way up to the monarch.
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The outsize impact of that interview is something that Michael Sheen, who plays the prince in Prime Video’s “A Very Royal Scandal,” out on Thursday, has had ample time to contemplate. To get into the role, he watched the original interview “hundreds upon hundreds of times,” he tells Variety. “The first thing I did when I woke up was listen to the audio of it.”
Having spent that much time listening to it, why does Sheen think it was so earthshattering? “It’s so rare that someone in a position of power and privilege would allow themselves to be put in that position,” he replies thoughtfully. “Usually what all too often happens is, if there is a controversial — possibly illegal — situation someone throws money at it and it goes away.” (That is, of course, what eventually did happen after Giuffre sued Andrew in New York for rape. Another reason Sheen thinks the interview is so important: “There has been no court case — that is the closest it seems that we’ll ever get to a person being made accountable in some way.”)
“But for a person to voluntarily put themselves in a position where they are being made accountable when that person is never having to be accountable, has never been made to be accountable, and it says so much that that person doesn’t even expect to be made accountable — You know, he goes into that situation and allows it to happen because he thinks he’s going to be in control of it,” he marvels.
Playing opposite Sheen is “Luther” star Ruth Wilson, who portrays a contradictory Maitlis: at work she is all business: military-inspired suits, razor sharp focus and, as Wilson says, “whip smart.” But her outwardly cool demeanour belies frenzied kicking below the surface, balancing a busy home life with two kids, a husband and a handbag “covered in pen ink.” There are also darker themes. As it’s revealed towards the end of three-part drama, Maitlis has had her own brush with toxic masculinity, having been the victim of stalking. The journalist, who is an executive producer on the drama, had little vanity about Wilson’s depiction, right down to a scene in which Wilson, as Maitlis, sits in on a meeting with curlers in her hair. “She was quite happy for things like her chaotic side to be seen a bit,” says Wilson. “I push it probably more than she actually is.”
Wilson, like most of Britain, had watched the interview live in November 2019 and been “pretty amazed by it.” When she was initially approached for the role of Maitlis, she did worry about whether there was anything more to say. “I was like, ‘How can you make it any better than what it already is?’” she remembers thinking. But the result, she says, “Is not just a recreation of that interview.”
Earlier this year Netflix released “Scoop,” the first dramatization of the interview, starring Gillian Anderson as Maitlis and Rufus Sewell as Prince Andrew. That version is based on a book by “Newsnight” producer Sam McAllister. With the interview itself having attracted a global audience (not to mention countless memes about sweating and London restaurant chain Pizza Express), plus one recreation already available, some viewers might wonder what “A Very Royal Scandal” can bring to the table.
For a start, it’s a three part series that goes deeper (“The Crown” style) into events that take place before and after the interview itself (“Scoop,” by contrast, is a single drama lasting just over 100 minutes). For Wilson, what appealed was also screenwriter Jeremy Brock’s “exploration of power and privilege and responsibility and journalism and that relationship between the press and the Royals and the BBC.”
Sheen felt the same about the screenplay. While striving for a “true and faithful” portrait of what transpired between Andrew and Maitlis, he knew there was “no point in just copying it. “I hope that it is close enough to the original to be thrilling for an audience,” he says. “But at the same time, I hope that the secret story of it, the thing that’s going on underneath that isn’t about copying something is also something that an audience can respond to and recognize as well.”
Wilson spent a lot of time with Maitlis in preparation for the role, even having the opportunity to turn the tables around and interview the now legendary interviewer. “I asked her straight-up questions,” Wilson reveals. “I went straight in with, do you think he’s guilty? And her answer was, ‘Well, guilty of what, you know?’ So we had big debates. It was brilliant.”
Sheen, of course, did not have the same opportunity. But despite his portrayal of Andrew as pompous and rude (the first line he utters on screen is “Fuck off,” said to a footman) he’s also curiously childlike, at one point challenging his private secretary Amanda Thirsk to an impromptu race in the garden. Sheen is a master impressionist, having portrayed a succession of public figures – including former Prime Minister Tony Blair, broadcaster David Frost and gameshow host Chris Tarrant – on screen with accuracy and humanity. It’s a skill he brings to his portrait of Andrew and it begs the question whether, having inhabited the prince’s expensive shoes, did he feel any sympathy for his vertiginous fall from grace?
“No,” Sheen says without hesitation. “I don’t feel sympathy for any of the characters because that’s not my job. That’s a judgment. I don’t make judgments on a character. Empathy is a very different thing.”
“Drama, I think, is dependent on challenging the audience at times, particularly with characters that they may go into having quite strong preconceived ideas about,” he continues. “Challenging them to allow themselves to kind of see things from that character’s point of view, regardless of whether they agree with them or have sympathy or anything else, but to kind of go, ‘Oh, that’s what it’s maybe like, Wow. I didn’t realize that. Now my understanding of this situation is maybe different how it was before.’”
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