In 2019 BBC Newsnight aired a now infamous interview of Prince Andrew by anchor Emily Maitlis in which he mounted an unconvincing defence of allegations against him by Virginia Giuffre, who claimed she had been trafficked by convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein for sex with the prince in London in 2001, when she was just 17.
Andrew denied any memory of having ever met Giuffre, despite a widely published photograph of the two taken by Epstein’s girlfriend and Andrew’s old friend, now a convicted sex offender, Ghislaine Maxwell. He insisted that he couldn’t have had sex with Giuffre on the night in question because he had been accompanying his eldest daughter Princess Beatrice to a friend’s birthday party at a PizzaExpress restaurant in Woking. He also told Maitlis that Giuffre’s memory of his profuse sweating was not credible because he had been suffering from a medical condition after serving in the Falklands war that had made it impossible for him to sweat at all.
These claims were seized upon by the global media and the public to ridicule the prince’s account, and the consequences for his days as a royal were catastrophic. He later reached an out-of-court settlement with Guiffre for an undisclosed sum after she sued him for “sexual assault and intentional infliction of emotional stress” in 2021.
The drama of the Newsnight interview and the behind-the-scenes negotiations that brought it to air have already been the subject of Scoop, a 2024 Netflix film written by Peter Moffat and starring Gillian Anderson as Maitlis, Rufus Sewell as Prince Andrew and Billie Piper as the show’s producer Sam McAlister. Now The Crown and This England director Julian Jarrold offers a three-part miniseries version, written by Jeremy Brock, based on Maitlis’ book about her career and starring Michael Sheen as Andrew and Ruth Wilson as Maitlis.
The longer format offers the opportunity to probe more deeply into the personal motivations, pressures and backstories of the two main characters and explore what happened before, during and after their infamous encounter.
Sheen is well-known for his onscreen portrayals of real characters from David Frost (Frost/Nixon) to football coach Brian Clough (The Damned United) and Tony Blair – who he has played three times (The Deal, The Queen and The Special Relationship). He met both Frost and Blair. The former prime minister, he recalls, “said that he hadn’t seen any of them but he displayed a surprisingly well informed knowledge of individual scenes so I’m not sure if he was being strictly honest about that”.
“It won’t surprise you to learn that I did not get to spend time with Prince Andrew and have access to him and his world. A lot of my research work was obviously through other people’s accounts and guesswork and what’s out there – interview footage and that kind of stuff. It’s quite a hall of mirrors when it comes to Andrew and the royal family in general – there’s what we’re allowed to see, what we’re invited into and then there’s what’s going on behind the scenes.”
Wilson, whose role as Maitlis marks her first onscreen portrayal of a public figure, said playing the Newsnight host was “a technical challenge in many ways. Trying to find a voice that was similar, trying to work in what is physically what we all sort of notice as being Emily but also then finding my own truth within that. We’re constructing a narrative over three arcs and that’s not the real Emily, that’s our constructed, dramatic version of her. So you’re constantly pulling in the things she’s telling you, the things that did happen, alongside the drama and making that work”.
The question of whether the prince is guilty may always remain “a mystery", says Sheen. "We don’t know what he did or didn’t do, there’s been no court case, there’s been no judgment. People have very strong opinions about it and feelings about it but we ultimately don’t know and that was a challenge for the storytelling of the piece.” He commends writer Brock for way his script works with this ambiguity and “still creates a satisfying dramatic experience for the audience. For me as an actor it was a challenge because I have to make choices and I have to know what my character has done or hasn’t done in order to know how to play scenes and react in the moment. So I have to make choices regardless of the reality of what has happened or not happened and that’s something that I’ve never had to do when playing a character based on a real person.”
Wilson was surprised to learn from the script that “they did the full interview and then Andrew insisted on adding in the PizzaExpress and the sweating and I was amazed because the two things that landed in the public sphere, were ridiculed, talked about most and undermined his story the most – he was the one who insisted that they went into the interview”.
Ultimately A Very Royal Scandal is not just a dramatic recreation of a famous event and its behind-the-scenes details but also, as Wilson points out, a story about “privilege and the responsibility of privilege for those who have privilege and how they use it. That’s not only for the royal family but for someone like Emily as well – she has a privilege because she’s in the position of asking those questions. So it’s about being responsible with those questions and it’s about people that have limited or little power and how those that are in positions of power can exploit that power too”.
- A Very Royal Scandal is streaming on Showmax.
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