‘He’s gulping for air’: Gillian Anderson and Rufus Sewell on recreating Prince Andrew’s ruinous interview

When Rufus Sewell was cast as Prince Andrew, Duke of York in Scoop – Netflix’s pacey new drama about the disastrous BBC Newsnight interview with Emily Maitlis – he scrutinised the original footage for insights into the Duke’s character. As Sewell replayed the encounter over and over, a strange thing happened: he found himself thinking of Ricky Gervais in The Office.

“Watching Andrew was like watching a comic masterpiece,” explains Sewell, 56, his eyes flashing with excitement. “He actually reminded me a lot of David Brent, but with a little less natural warmth. It was the way he was speaking past the interviewer, directly to the viewer; very aware of the effects he desired – little epiphanies he’d whipped up on his own, as fresh meat for the camera.”

On that Saturday evening in November 2019, two million viewers watched agog as – pinioned by Maitlis (played in Scoop by Gillian Anderson) – the Duke dug himself into an ever deeper hole about the nature of his relationships both with the late, convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and Virginia Roberts, who was underage at the time. He was subsequently stripped of royal duties and remains in disgrace to this day.

The encounter won a host of awards for Newsnight and spawned a million memes, inspired by the Duke’s various declarations: that he was “too honourable” to end his friendship with billionaire Epstein; that, on the night Roberts said she’d met him in Tramp nightclub, he could be found at Pizza Express in Woking; that he suffered from a rare inability to sweat.

Yet, despite the hilarity all this provoked, everyone involved in Scoop was also aware that at the core of the interview lay serious subject matter – paedophilia and sex-trafficking – that needed handling with sensitivity. And so Sewell, whose career has taken him from the stage of the National Theatre in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia to Netflix’s political thriller The Diplomat, was determined not to allow his Prince Andrew to slip into caricature.

“I have strong feelings about whether he is guilty or not that I want to keep to myself, but it’s a very important part of the job to remind people that it’s human beings who do these things,” he says. “I grew up in an era where Andrew was supposedly ‘the cool Royal’. I watched a lot of footage from when he was younger, talking to people in factories and offices and he was really – inarguably – charming.”

Ruefully admitting that his dashing looks have made him the “lazy” go-to actor for casting directors seeking “dissolute Lords,” Sewell says he was anxious that a less-than-perfect impression would distract viewers from the drama, “and I’m not a natural mimic.” So he minutely studied Prince Andrew’s mannerisms and vocal tics. “He wants to be seen as one of the lads: blokey, Navy, can talk to anyone and that’s reflected in the looseness of his vowels.” Sometimes, he’d even dress like the Duke: “I’d put on a jacket, pull my hair down like him – all to find some sort of commonality.”

Once filming began, the make-up team would spend up to four hours a day getting Sewell ready for the cameras. “They put on a bald cap, wispy hair over that and then attached bits to the nostrils, round the chin, the forehead and cheeks,” he says. “As my face receded, his came through.” At one point the resemblance became so strong that even friends of the actor failed to recognise him in photographs, and the producers decided to tone down the prosthetics since, as Sewell puts it, “if you go too far, you start to be watchable in the wrong way.”

Another challenge for the filmmakers was how to maintain dramatic tension. After all, most of us will have already seen the original interview, or at least know how it played out. What keeps us gripped throughout Scoop is its depiction of the dogged pursuit of the interview by Sam McAlister (played by Billie Piper), the Newsnight producer on whose memoir the drama is based, and whose tenacity eventually convinced the Duke that talking to the BBC would be a valuable opportunity to dispel his old reputation as “Randy Andy”.

“It’s very much a thriller,” says Gillian Anderson, who, on the way to becoming Maitlis, has played everyone from Dana Scully in The X-Files to Margaret Thatcher in The Crown. “It’s propulsive, despite the fact we know what the end result is.” Besides, Anderson points out, plenty of unanswered questions remain: not least, exactly why the late Queen’s middle son (and reputedly her favourite) ignored his mother’s  edict – “never complain, never explain” – with consequences that one commentator would subsequently liken to “a plane crashing into an oil tanker, causing a tsunami, triggering a nuclear explosion.”

“We don’t know to what degree Andrew had rehearsed, or whether his answers were his own or fed to him,” says Anderson, 55, over Zoom, her tone deliciously arch. “But somebody thought they were a good idea. He had the chance for the interview to go very, very differently. Even afterwards, he thought it was a success – to the point where Emily was given a tour around Buckingham Palace.”

But, she adds, it’s worth bearing in mind that the Royal family “play a role that is very valuable to a lot of people in this country and part of that role includes being sequestered and not necessarily living in the real world. So why would we expect them to be able to respond in a real-world way?”

Sewell agrees. “Andrew is a product of his environment,” he says. “To be what he believes himself to be demands the acquiescence of the subject. It’s clear he’s never sat opposite anyone who’s said, ‘Oh, that’s b------s’ or ‘F--k off!’ to him.”
Returning to footage of the original interview, he says, “when you watch him, you see a strange mixture of guilt and innocence and victimhood. This is someone, in my opinion, who does not think of himself as a bad person and has an enormous amount of compassion and sympathy… for himself.

“He’s constructed a narrative in which he is in some way a victim of his own honour. The people who were sent out to defend him say the same thing: ‘He was set up.’ That is quite likely, given Epstein’s modus operandi. However, one can argue: if you’re setting up a honey trap, how do you know who likes honey and who doesn’t?

“From his perspective, some of the stuff he says is true – it’s just not a very good sign.” So when, for example, Prince Andrew says he has “no memory” of Virginia Roberts, “does that mean this was someone who did not register as a fully-rounded human being? Does it mean there have been so many similar encounters? It’s all very telling.”

Sewell studied YouTube videos in which the Duke’s words and gestures in the Newsnight interview are pored over by behavioural analysts. “All the experts agree at certain points he was telling the truth but using it to mislead – quibbling about whether something happened on one day or another to give the appearance of being a stickler for the truth in order to avoid another, darker spot.”

While Sewell (apprehensively) embraced his challenge, Anderson tells me she found the prospect of inhabiting Maitlis “so scary,” she initially declined the role. “It was even more daunting than playing Mrs Thatcher. I worried, ‘Will I be asking for trouble – not just embodying somebody who’s alive, but who’s such a formidable presence, with real fans and whom people have real opinions about?’” Happily, her partner, Peter Morgan, creator of The Crown, reminded her she’d also originally turned down the role as sex therapist Jean Milburn in Netflix’s Sex Education – a part that has since earned cult status and brought her a whole new generation of fans – and persuaded her to reconsider.

Like Sewell, she took an obsessive approach to researching Maitlis, a 53 -year-old journalist who is so revered by her team that she comes across as something approaching royalty herself. “She swims, runs, nobody’s ever seen her eat,” marvels McAlister in Scoop. “She’s superwoman”. Now presenter of The News Agents podcast, Maitlis declined Anderson’s request to meet, because she’s producing a rival drama based on the interview – A Very Royal Scandal for Amazon – in which she’ll be played by Ruth Wilson (opposite Michael Sheen as Prince Andrew). 

Still, Anderson discovered quite how regal Maitlis can be when the pair crossed paths at a recent charity event. “It was very funny,” she says laughing. “I’d come that morning from being with my kids in the country, a week wearing muddy clothes” – Anderson has three children from previous relationships – “and changed really quickly; no make-up, no hairbrush. 

“Then there’s Emily in a white skirt, tanned to the gills, high heels, gorgeous. If you’d asked anyone which one was the movie star and which was the journalist, I know what they would have said. I’d been living inside her for so long, I was overly familiar and went right in for a big hug. She was very gracious, but very boundaried. She’s a force to be reckoned with.”

Scoop was filmed in a Watford warehouse made to look exactly like Buckingham Palace’s South drawing room, down to the gold-and-red-velvet dining chairs set six feet apart, from where interviewer and interviewee faced off. The encounter was shot in a single take. “Emily says of the scene, ‘It’s like a gunfight,’” says Anderson. “And filming it, that’s exactly how it felt – like a duel.”

Scoop’s script (by Peter Moffat) is too smart to over-egg its feminist message: but it makes clear that ultimately it took a team of women (headed by Newsnight editor Esme Wren, played by Romola Garai) to, as Anderson puts it, “hold power to account,” leading to the Duke making Roberts a £12 million settlement, while admitting no liability.

Although we cannot know how he might have responded to a bunch of male executives, Sewell has no doubt that “it would have made a subtle but possibly profound difference to the way he approached the interview, his level of confidence and to what he thought was achievable. People make unconscious assumptions like that all the time, probably even more so in Andrew’s case, because he brings less imagination to bear than most people.”

In the end, Sewell concludes, what brought Andrew down was a polite but steely woman refusing to defer to him. “He was congratulated and adored as a child for being a scamp, the lovable palace rascal, all those things boys are celebrated for – even more back then. He’s been led to believe it’s his natural charm that makes people like him, not his prince status. In this situation, sitting opposite Emily, he’s attempting to reignite that but he can’t get the oxygen to do it. It’s not a lack of manners, or rudeness or aggression on Emily’s part. She’s just not playing that half of the contract he expects – and he’s left gulping for air.”

Scoop is on Netflix from April 5