by Gill Pringle
Nearly two million people watched Newsnight journalist Emily Maitlis interview Prince Andrew on his relationships with set trafficking pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein and with Virginia Roberts, who was underage at the time.
Amplified by social media, the interview was deemed a veritable train wreck. The Prince’s answers were deemed as lacking empathy or remorse. The inquisition lasted an hour, but its afterlife was much longer, with countless memes about not sweating and “ordinary shooting weekends” appearing online within minutes.
Sending a thunderous rumble throughout the monarchy, Prince Andrew was forced to step back from public duties as a result.
But as the dust settled, two questions remained: how on earth had Newsnight secured the interview? And why had Prince Andrew agreed to do it in the first place?
Netflix’s telemovie Scoop aims to set the record straight. Starring Rufus Sewell as the oblivious, almost child-like Prince, Gillian Anderson as journalist presenter Emily Maitlis, while Keeley Hawes (Bodyguard) plays Andrew’s adoring private secretary Amanda Thirsk, who thinks that Prince Andrew merely has an image problem.
But, at the heart of the film is the story of Newsnight booker Sam McAlister’s negotiations with Newsnight and Buckingham Palace, detailing how she was able to land the interview.
Prompted to write an account of those events, Scoops: Behind the Scenes of the BBC’s Most Shocking Interviews, word of her memoir got out before it was even published, resulting in a bidding war for the rights to the book.
Talking to McAllister [below, with Billie Piper, who plays her in the film] today, she recalls: “To be honest, I just wanted people – and I thought it would basically be my mum and three of my friends – to know what actually happened, because the question I get asked the most is: ‘How did this happen?’
“So, in our movie, we see not only the 5% culmination of this incredible interview that traveled the world – but also the 95% before that. I wanted to answer the questions that people ask me relentlessly. ‘How did it begin?’ ‘What did you do?’ ‘What did you say?’ ‘How did you convince him?’ And our movie is obviously the story of that,” she says.
“My small ambition was to write a book to tell that story – but I never imagined for one millisecond that it would end up on Netflix with these incredible actresses,” she says, too modest to explain that it wasn’t just the story they liked, but its narrator too, casting Billie Piper to portray McAlister.
Reflecting on how she secured the extraordinary interview, McAlister tells a tale of tenacity and persuasion.
“I’d spent 13 months dealing with the palace and over the period of that 13 months, the Prince Andrew story had gone from effectively Forgotten Prince to Problem Prince – to the biggest story in the world,” says McAlister.
“And then to culminate in sitting 15 feet behind him in the south drawing room of Buckingham Palace listening to those cataclysmic answers – it was the most extraordinary experience as a human. But as a journalist, it was just mind blowing.”
With Piper cast to portray her in the drama, the two women effortlessly bonded.
“It’s challenging playing anybody, but playing Sam is a gift for me as an actor and as a person,” says Piper. “On a professional note, it’s rare that you meet people that are so impressive with such an enormous skill set and also incredible quirks. There’s just so much to take as an actor.
“And, unlike Gillian and Rufus, I didn’t have the pressure of playing someone who was terribly public facing, so I was able to take bits that I thought I would enjoy and relish and would help the story, and then find my own way to land the story beats. In many ways, I had the best of both worlds.
“Also, it was really useful for me because we have a lot of similarities. Even though our lives have been very different, we have similar backgrounds, I would say, so that was nice for me and a really good emotional way into playing Sam,” says Piper.
Scoop director Philip Martin surely knows a thing or two about the monarchy, thanks to his earlier work on The Crown.
But he did have concerns over whether actors might shy away from playing Prince Andrew, given the circumstances of the story.
Enter Rufus Sewell.
“Rufus is brilliant because he wasn’t afraid of playing such a high-profile character. He understood in some ways that Prince Andrew, twenty or thirty years earlier, had charmed the crowds, was a celebrity, was in some ways ‘The Relatable Royal. Rufus has this energy, this charisma that he embraces,” says the director.
“I had a strong take on what I thought was going on with him. I’ve made my own personal decisions and judgments which I will keep to myself,” says the actor known for his TV roles in The Diplomat and The Man in the High Castle, alongside his diverse film roles, including the Australia-shot Dark City.
“But as far as I was concerned, I just had to not think about how it would be received because the danger is, or at least the likelihood is, people are either going to say that it’s one sided in terms of favouring him, or having too much sympathy, or vice versa. You can’t think about that,” says Sewell, who is barely recognisable beneath double chin prosthetics and a large girth.
If nobody can say for sure why Andrew chose to do the interview at all, Sewell has his theories.
“I think he feels a genuine sense of victimhood, and how not fair everything is, which is quite palpable. It’s also a very, very limited imagination as to the humanity of other people. I think he has enormous compassion and sympathy… for himself. He honestly felt, I think, that the interview could be a silver bullet to make people understand the real him,” says the actor.
Gillian Anderson was amazed at Sewell’s physical transformation. “I’d seen him go through the process a little bit in our makeup trailer and saw him for the camera test. What was really, really uncanny was once we started the interview where – you know, I’d asked him a question as Emily Maitlis – and hearing him answer as Prince Andrew and his answer was uncanny how accurate it was,” says the former X-Files star.
“Everything about it, every last detail was so perfect, and so the biggest challenge was staying focused and responding as Emily rather than responding as Gillian going, ‘Oh my god, that’s amazing!’” she says [pictured above with director Philip Martin on the Scoop set].
The entire cast were impressed at how Philip Martin managed to create a film which still managed to pack in the suspense – despite the fact that audiences know how the story ends.
Piper was enchanted by their director. “Philip is a lovely man. When we finished, I realised how important it was to have that personality type on set for something of this nature because what we’re dramatising is sensitive, and there is a level of respect that needs to happen around the work in order to feel very authentic,” she says.
“He’s very patient, very gracious and that made a very female-heavy cast feel quite relaxed. I think he brought the best out in all of us and his directing style is very calm and sort of soothing, but then you see the edit and it’s totally at odds with him as a person – in a great way.
“We didn’t expect it. It feels very young and fresh and there were things that were a surprise when I saw it for the first time and I thought ‘Okay, this is brilliant’. He coasts the line of dealing with a very tricky subject matter where people are profoundly moved and disgusted. And then the sort of absurdity of some of the answers that people can’t help but laugh at – so, he’s moving between those emotions. That’s very hard to achieve,” adds Piper.
One delicious small performance worth looking out for is that of Kate Winslet’s daughter Mia Threapleton in the role of Andrew’s chambermaid – tasked with organising his teddy bears on the royal bed. Let’s just say it has an amusing Australian twist.
Scoop is streaming now
