When Emily met Andrew

A Very Royal Scandal is the second scripted project telling the story of Emily Maitlis’s bombshell interview with Prince Andrew. Stars Ruth Wilson and Michael Sheen – and Maitlis herself – pull back the curtain on the Prime Video three-parter.

It was an interview that changed the lives of interviewee and interviewer forever and sent shockwaves through the royal family and around the world.

When Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, agreed to be interviewed by journalist Emily Maitlis for Newsnight, the fact that the BBC current affairs show had managed to land a sit-down with the royal at all was a shock in itself. But the fallout saw the Duke stripped of his royal titles and duties, and raised uncomfortable new questions about the position of the monarchy in modern Britain.

Taking place in November 2019, the interview revolved around Andrew’s relationship with convicted sex offender and trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, who had died in his jail cell three months earlier. The Duke had faced intense scrutiny about his involvement with Epstein for years, particularly following a visit to the disgraced financier’s New York home in 2010, two years after Epstein had been convicted of procuring a child for prostitution and of soliciting a prostitute.

Then in 2014, Andrew was himself accused of abuse, with Virginia Giuffre naming him among the men she claimed to have been supplied to by Epstein in 2001, when she was 17 years old.

While the royal viewed the interview as a chance to clear his name and tell his side of the story, the Newsnight team saw it as a major coup and seized the opportunity to take this powerful figure to task. To say that Andrew did not come out of it well would be putting it extremely lightly.

Now, in a miniseries based on Maitlis’s own book, Prime Video’s A Very Royal Scandal tells the story of the interview, focusing on Maitlis, Prince Andrew and the people around them across three clearly defined episodes, respectively focusing on the lead-up to the interview, the interview itself, and the aftermath.

It comes hot on the heels of Netflix film scoop, which was based on Newsnight producer Sam McAlister’s own book about the interview. Released in April, it starred Gillian Anderson as Maitlis and Rufus Sewell as Andrew, while McAlister was portrayed by Billie Piper.

Amazon’s version, however, promises to go deeper into the story and the characters at its heart. Written by Jeremy Brock and directed by Julian Jarrold, the show stars Ruth Wilson as Maitlis and Michael Sheen as Prince Andrew, with Alex Jennings, Joanna Scanlan and Éanna Hardwicke among the supporting cast.

Debuting on Prime Video today, A Very Royal Scandal is produced by Blueprint Pictures and counts Maitlis among its executive producers. Here, Maitlis discusses the origins of the project and her involvement in it, while Wilson and Sheen outline how they approached their characters.

How did the conception and development of this project come about?
Maitlis: It was a project that probably needed distance. It wasn’t something that could have been done in the weeks or months after the interview. Because quite frankly, we didn’t know the effect the interview would have.

One of the things I love about Jeremy’s writing and what the team have brought to it is that you get the sense not just of the ‘chase’ or the ‘kill’ or the interview itself. You get this rise towards it, and then you get the fallout and the repercussions and the consequences.

That seems a really important part of what we brought. If you look at the three hours [of the show], the interview itself sits bang in the middle, chronologically, of the three parts. And that’s because we felt it was really important to try to understand the ramifications of it, and you wouldn’t have had that straightaway.

Jeremy’s done this sort of 360 of so many of the Newsnight team, so many members and so many perspectives on it from Andrew’s daughters to the Newsnight producers, and he brought all these stories together.

But actually we’re still kind of trying to work out what the fallout is. It’s an unfinished story. And there isn’t closure, it isn’t neat. We talk about the power of journalism, but also, frankly, its limitations as well. We know that Andrew’s life has changed; we don’t know if Epstein’s victims’ lives have materially changed. And I think that question still hangs over the whole thing.

How do you feel now about the impact this interview has had on the world, on Prince Andrew, on the royal family?
Maitlis: I think we can see the impact on Andrew’s life at the moment. That was very sudden – losing your titles, losing your royal duties, losing your uniform, losing the respect of the British public. And I guess the question we’re asking ourselves now is, has it reset the shape of the monarchy in any form?

Someone who saw [the show] said to me, ‘You realise that one of the Queen’s last big decisions was to let Andrew do that interview?’ It had her blessing – we know that. And you have to sort of wonder, were there people around Prince Charles at that point who said, ‘Was that the right decision? Was it a bad decision?’

Has the shape of the monarchy slightly changed as a result? I think you’re starting to see, potentially, the ramifications in terms of the shape of the monarchy.

When I look at what we know of the lives of [the accusers] now, we know that one of them got this big settlement, millions of pounds, but never had a day in court. There is no closure. And I should make really clear, we don’t know that she was a victim of Andrew; we do know she was a victim of Epstein, so I make that differentiation. I think we’re still working that out.

In a much smaller way, for the journalists [involved in the interview], we’ve all scattered. Newsnight is very much still there, but we’ve all kind of gone our separate ways. And I wonder if we all came, in a way, to a full stop after that interview.

As a journalist, how do you process that impact?
Maitlis: I don’t know, actually. I don’t think it was a story about us; it was never meant to be a story about us or the Newsnight team. What Jeremy does in the drama is just show these two worlds colliding, and you see a lot of the BBC world and a lot of the inside machinations of the palace.

Of course, you’re always thrilled by the bit that you don’t know as well. I know the BBC bit, but I don’t know the palace bit. What the drama really does is show that smack, that clash of the two worlds, these two institutions that suddenly come up against each other.

How did you feel about the casting, and seeing yourself depicted by Ruth Wilson?
Maitlis: It was a ‘wildest dream’ casting. I’ve loved seeing them both as actors on stage and on the screen. Weirdly, Frost/Nixon [in which Sheen played David Frost, interviewing Richard Nixon] has long been one of my favourite films. And so there’s this beautiful circularity to seeing the interlocutor go full circle and become the interviewee. There’s something sort of perfect about that.

On a deeper level, when the casting was announced, I realised it would be serious. I knew they would each bring to these roles the kind of complexity they deserve. We weren’t interested in comedy villains or swashbuckling heroism. It had to be really nuanced and compassionate and sensitive, and it had to round out characters that could have been very one-dimensional.

Ruth, what was it about this that first attracted you to the role?
Wilson: The blonde hair! Honestly, I loved wearing that blonde wig. I loved being blonde. I tried to get it off the make-up artist but she wouldn’t let me have it.

There were loads of things. One, Emily. I’ve watched Emily on Newsnight many times and I love the journalistic world. I’ve never played or been involved in that world. I watched the interview when it came out in 2019, and I watched it with a group of friends. We were gobsmacked. I mean, it was the best piece of drama on TV I had seen in a long time. It held my attention for a whole hour. I laughed, I was open-mouthed, I thought, ‘Wow, this is extraordinary,’ and I thought, ‘How on earth did that ever come about?’

Of course, there’s no point just recreating the interview, which is great drama in itself – it has to have something else to say. So when I read Jeremy’s brilliant script, I realised there were so many things it revealed: the behind the scenes of these two public characters; in the room with the Newsnight team, seeing how they get an interview; the nature of being a journalist. [As a journalist] you’re constantly on a live wire – anything can happen at any moment and you have to be awake and alert to it. Your adrenaline and your cortisone levels are way high.

I thought Jeremy’s script asks more questions than it gives solutions to, and that’s a sign of a great script – asking the audience to think about what they’re watching, what this thing wants, a larger context.

How did you prepare for the role?
Wilson: I stalked Emily – I watched her endlessly! I visited her on The News Agents set [the podcast Maitlis hosts alongside Jon Sopel and Lewis Goodall], so I watched her at work. I interviewed her, which was terrifying – interviewing a great interviewee. I asked her what was inside her handbag…

What did you learn about her that we wouldn’t know?
Wilson: She eats lots of Percy Pigs. The inside of her handbag is covered in ink. She lent me her bag, so I carry her real bag in the show.

What else? She likes dressing-up parties, hair rollers. The hair rollers were not in the script originally but that came from me observing Emily at The News Agents podcast.

Of course, you see the public version, and it’s performative in some ways, being a newsreader. My naïve understanding of being a newsreader was that it’s a teleprompter and you just read off it. I didn’t understand the amount of work that goes into being a journalist on that level, that you are there with the team working on the story all day.

Meeting Emily, she’s a life force. She’s incredibly fun and charismatic and vivid, and that was really fun to show the private and public version of her, and to find the humour and fun in her, which lots of you don’t get to see all the time. So that was a joy. And Emily was incredibly generous with her time, letting me in and trusting me with her life and her inner relationships. I loved playing her.

Is there anything uniquely challenging about recreating something we’re all familiar with, in terms of the interview and the person?
Wilson: There is an expectation, obviously, the audience have of that interview. They’ve seen that interview, they’ve seen certain elements of it memed, over and over again. So of course, both Michael and I knew that certain bits, people were going to be looking for and we’d have to replicate.

But this interview exists in the context of a whole three-hour story arc. Everyone else just saw the interview – they didn’t see the build-up; they didn’t see the aftermath. So that interview in our drama is informed by what happened before, what happened after. And we bring that stuff into it.

Both Michael and I watched that interview, I mean, how many times? It was the challenge of trying to marry those two things: the reality, the real interview, and our interpretation of that. Acting’s an interpretive art, so it’s marrying those two things and serving the script Jeremy had written.

Michael, what drew you to the role of Prince Andrew?
Sheen: I always think of myself as an audience member, first and foremost, so I read the script and if it really compels me, captivates me and makes me ask questions and challenges me and all that kind of stuff then that’s good.

With the character part, I sort of have to feel, ‘Is it within my reach, potentially, but not so close?’ It has to be far enough away to be a challenge, to push me. But do I feel on some gut level that I can get there?

When you’re doing a story that is based on real events, to make the decision to go with it, you have to really trust every element. Because once you say yes, you have to let go in a way, because then it’s about playing this character, and I have no objectivity there.

My job is to try to make the person I’m playing as real as possible, and as rendered and complex as possible. I’m going to be going into areas of the character that maybe if I was still on the outside – because I have opinions about the person – I might be less likely to want to explore. But once I’m in, I’m in. I have to trust with everyone else involved that I’m in safe hands, and I did with this.

Obviously Ruth had access to her character, but you didn’t. What was that like?
Sheen: Well, you’ve got the script and Jeremy’s already done all the hard work. So then it was watching everything I can, reading everything I can and trying to find something, find the point of connection.

Whenever I’ve played a character based on a real-life person, I’m looking for the point of connection. Where’s the thing that suddenly hooks me in somehow? And it was the footage of Andrew when he came back from the Falklands on the dockside with the rose in his mouth. I’m thinking, ‘That’s about as good a moment as you’re ever going to get.’ You’re the brave, conquering hero returning – really fit and really hot, and everyone thinks you’re great. And it was sort of downhill from there wasn’t it?

That journey was my hook in. What was that like? Imaginatively and emotionally, that sort of connection, to know what you’re fighting for and fighting against [is what I look for].

How did you approach depicting something so problematic while also humanising the character?
Sheen: The other challenge with the piece as a whole is that, as well as playing a character, there’s a mystery at the heart of it. We don’t definitively know what he did or didn’t do and what happened.

That was another reason why I was drawn to the script, because the way Jeremy depicted that, by the time you get to the end, you have a satisfying experience as an audience member, yet you don’t know. There is ambiguity and you don’t know, and that’s really difficult to pull off. Watching the three episodes, I feel like Julian has then realised that as a piece.

For the actor, obviously I can’t play ambiguity; I have to play specificity. So I had to make some decisions and choices [about Andrew], which I never told anyone, but I had to know.
We did do certain key moments in certain scenes where we would talk about, ‘I will do one take that leans into this a little bit, and then I’ll do another take that leans into that a little bit,’ to find how far you could go before you start telling a different story. But I had to have a very specific thing in my head.

tagged in: A Very Royal Scandal, Amazon, Amazon MGM Studios, Blueprint Pictures, Emily Maitlis, Michael Sheen, Prime Video, Prince Andrew, Ruth Wilson