It was the interview that had everyone talking. In 2019, on the BBC program Newsnight, Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, sat down with journalist Emily Maitlis in Buckingham Palace to address his relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and allegations of his own misconduct. (The subject was also covered by Netflix in the April film Scoop.) Now, the three-parter A Very Royal Scandal (premiering September 19 on Prime Video) starring Good Omens’ Michael Sheen and Luther’s Ruth Wilson dramatizes how the hourlong chat came together. (Watch the video above to see Sheen and Wilson talk about filming the interview.)
“Because I’ve played a lot of real-life characters, people assume I want to [do that], but it’s the script, it’s the story” that drew him in, Sheen tells TV Insider. He, like everyone, watched the interview when it aired and was “shocked, amazed, and disturbed.” So when it came to doing A Very Royal Scandal, “I was interested just knowing what it was about.”
He was also drawn to the “challenge” of playing a real-life person. “And at the heart of the story is a mystery because we don’t know what he did or didn’t do. There’s been no court case. There’s been no definitive answer to that question,” he noted. “I was intrigued as to how the drama would cope with that. When there’s so much that is unknowable about one of the characters, how can it possibly work as a drama? I felt by the time I’d read the scripts that Jeremy Brock had done a brilliant job of creating a very satisfying, dramatic experience with a kind of enigma at the heart of it, a great ambiguity there. I also thought, which I think always makes for good drama, that you play with expectations and reveal things about [characters] that you maybe didn’t know or it makes you think about them in a different way. That was the challenge for me as the actor, was to take on the playing of a character who people—including myself—had quite strong feelings about and then play around with that a bit and make it surprising.”
Wilson, too, notes the lack of a case. “It’s something that needs to keep being talked about because it’s about power and privilege and holding power to account. Without having a criminal case, we don’t know what the end result of that all is. We don’t know the truth of it,” the English actress explains. “It’s also about what’s so integral to our nation in this country. We have hierarchies of power. We have these structures, we have the royal family, but we have the press and we have the BBC, and they’re all sort of entwined. So I think it’s really a study of our nation, too, and how it conducts itself and how as the viewers of that news, we thrive in it, and who’s really left not being served, and it’s the victims at the bottom of the pile or the people that don’t have the power to speak.”
Christopher Raphael / Blueprint / Sony Pictures Television
It was Wilson’s first time playing a public figure and a journalist, and she was “fascinated” by both aspects. She, too, had watched the interview when it aired and was “gobsmacked.” She’s also a self-proclaimed “big news junkie” and had watched Emily Maitlis on screen many times. In preparation for the role, she also read Maitlis’ book on which the series is based, Airhead: The Imperfect Art of Making News, and interviewed the journalist herself.
That was “terrifying,” Wilson reveals. “I asked her very intelligent questions but also the mundane, [like] what’s inside her handbag. I wanted to get kind of the real Emily. I went to watch her at work at News Agents. I spent lots of time with her on Zoom.” It wasn’t just about the scripts but also “trying to get more nuance out of those interactions, what her relationship was like with her husband or her dog. Of course it ends up being an interpretation at the end of the day. She gives me what she wants to give and then she trusts me to take that away and look after it for her and to sort of filter it through my own eyes and also through Jeremy’s eyes.” She also worked with a voice coach to get Maitlis’ voice and a movement coach for how she moves.
Maitlis, who serves as an executive producer on the series, also notes that Wilson asked about her handbag, “which she said would reveal more about me, my state of mind, and my daily routine than anything I would actually tell her. My handbag is a complete mess — it’s the handbag of a catastro-fantasist who is imagining all the things that could go wrong on any one day, so yes, maybe that was more helpful than anything I would freely admit in a conversation,” she says.
“But then she asked me questions about what was going through my head during the interview. ‘In one word?’ I said ‘fear’. Fear that you’ve missed something, forgotten something, spent too long on one area and not gone deep enough on another. Fear that the interview will end and you won’t know if you got it wrong,” Maitlis continues, adding that remained until she’d rewatched the interview more than once. “I remember turning to my producer Jake straight after the recording had ended and whispering, ‘What did I leave out?’”
Christopher Raphael / Blueprint / Sony Pictures Television
For Sheen, preparing to play Prince Andrew and other characters based on real-life people is about holding back the “impersonation side” as long as possible. “You don’t want the audience to be spending time thinking about how like this person you are or not,” he says. “What I was surprised at with Andrew in a way is that, for someone who is a member of the royal family and the epitome of what it is to be posh, the epitome of what it is to be incredibly upper class, when you’d listen to his speaking voice, there were things that sound very not posh at times, particularly in the interview.”
A Very Royal Scandal shows 20 minutes of the hour-long interview. With it just being the two stars, it comes across like a two-hander play. In the script, it’s “quite chopped up,” Sheen shares, and so both he and Wilson wanted to run straight through it, “so that we could look at what’s going on underneath the interview. Emily’s strategy is to ask certain questions in order to be able to ask the kind of killer question, and Andrew is kind of gauging how much Emily knows and what he offers up. He’s sort of reluctant to offer certain things up until he knows that she definitely is aware of that.”
Maitlis “constructed the questions in a particular way. She built that interview like a case. She knew exactly how to get him to a place to ask the big questions,” adds Wilson. “For me playing it, I was like, I really want to be able to play that through because it changes—her comfort levels change, his comfort levels change. How is she going to get him there? It’s all very nuanced. The stakes were high, and it felt like it.”
For Maitlis, “the high, high stakes” also stood out to her watching the interview dramatized for the series. “When it’s you doing the interview, you don’t get a chance to see it from the outside. You have to live in the moment, listening to every word, watching every gesture, deciding when you should interrupt and when you must stay quiet. Your muscle memory kicks in as a journalist and you just have to go with the flow,” she details. “Being able to watch Ruth in that seat and Michael opposite her made me understand the game of chess—just how much was riding on it and where it could all quickly, suddenly, go so wrong.”
Related‘A Very Royal Scandal’ Trailer Teases Emily Maitlis’ Shocking Prince Andrew Interview
As for the original interview, “I’m not very good at rewatching things I have done,” Maitlis admits. “There’s an old rule in television that when you think you’ve screwed up you should watch it back- as it’s never as bad as your worst fears. And when you think something was great you shouldn’t watch it back as it might not be as good as you hoped. But sometimes I encounter people I have huge respect for who tell me they have watched the interview many, many times and keep on going back. A few months back, we interviewed Jez Butterworth, probably my favourite playwright, who told me he put the interview on every few weeks just to have another look as he got something new from it each time. I was so thrilled to hear that.”
It’s really no surprise. “We are fairly obsessed with the royal family in this country,” the Welsh Sheen says. “It’s the longest-running soap opera we have.”
A Very Royal Scandal, Series Premiere, Thursday, September 19, Prime Video
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