‘A daring raid deep inside the monarchy’: Netflix dramatisation of Prince Andrew’s infamous interview

Last month Netflix aired its latest production to do with the British royal family; no, not another series of The Crown, but a drama “based on real events, fictionalised for dramatic purposes” – plus ca change, then – of the bombshell Newsnight interview Emily Maitlis famously conducted with Prince Andrew on 16 November 2019, concerning his long friendship with the convicted sex-offender Jeffrey Epstein.

The drama, directed by Philip Martin (also of The Crown, interestingly), is based on the first three chapters of a book by Sam McAlister, Newsnight’s then-booker, played here by Billie Piper, all corkscrew bleached blonde hair, pale lips, black nails and an enviable Chanel logo on her jacket. McAlister is portrayed as gritty working class, more Daily Mail than Newsnight, as someone snobbishly says, but she’s dogged and hungry and it’s her tenacity that secures the prized interview, seemingly against all odds.

Scoop begins in 2010 with the photojournalist, Jae Donnelly, taking the infamous photo of Prince Andrew and Jeffrey Epstein walking in Central Park after Epstein’s release from prison in Palm Beach as a convicted sex offender in 2009. Andrew, apparently, needed to borrow money from Epstein and Epstein needed to be seen with Andrew to rehabilitate himself on the New York social scene. As someone said it was like putting a rattlesnake in an aquarium with a mouse.

The casting is gripping, if a bit weird: divinely handsome Rufus Sewell becomes an elderly roué called Prince Andrew with adroit use of prosthetics and what looks like quite a lot of eye make-up, although I had a certain amount of trouble with my willing suspense of disbelief over this. Gillian Anderson plays Emily Maitlis but delivery-wise she’s still got the portentous faux-grand overtones of the Maggie she portrayed in The Crown which she seems unable to shed. Emily Maitlis is a serious character but apparently not quite as ferocious as she is shown to be here with her inferiors terrified of her, a la Anna Wintour. Anderson/Maitlis has the same power bob, however, minus the dark glasses.

If the interview itself is the centrepiece of the show, what Scoop does brilliantly is to turn the long, tense run-up to the interview into a gripping drama, with thriller-type music. We see Sam McAlister wooing Amanda Thirsk (Keeley Hawes), Prince Andrew’s private secretary, who, fatally, believes that Prince Andrew has been misunderstood and that if he is allowed to give his version of the events surrounding his friendship with Epstein, all will be well. Fat chance. “What if he’s good?” Maitlis asks as she and her producer Emily Wren (Romola Garrai) work on the questions that will be asked and it becomes apparent that the all unwitting Andrew is entering another aquarium with another rattlesnake in the shape of Maitlis and her dagger-sharp questioning.

All the highlights are included: the inability to sweat, the birthday party at Pizza Express in Woking, a proletarian event that Andrew remembers so well because it’s not the sort of thing he ordinarily does, another birthday party at Sandringham thrown for Ghislaine Maxwell, described off-handedly as an “ordinary shooting week-end”.

The lack of remorse is breath-taking. Rufus Sewell does a brilliant job of portraying Andrew’s complete and utter lack of empathy. Underpinning the whole exercise is a strong sense that the prince really doesn’t get what all the fuss is about. As for the victims, including most particularly, Virginia Guiffre (Roberts), he denies having ever met her.

As one of the Newsnight researchers says in Scoop: you couldn’t be anywhere near Epstein and not know what was going on, although Prince Andrew appears not to have noticed the life-size naked doll hanging from a chandelier, the massage room soap shaped like genitalia and the painting of Bill Clinton wearing a blue dress with its reference to Monica Lewinsky, even though he frequently stayed in Epstein’s mansion.

Unbelievably, Princess Beatrice attends a meeting with her father in the preparation for the interview which somehow says it all: how inappropriate can it be to bring along your daughter when you’re going to be questioned about links to a convicted sex offender. Many of the girls involved were of a similar age to Andrew’s daughters, a fact that doesn’t seem to have occurred to him, or to Princess Beatrice, for that matter.

What is clear is that Prince Andrew has been living under the protection of “Mummy” and the palace for so long that he thinks normal rules don’t apply to him. This is the “scoop” of the film’s title.

At the end of the interview the hapless prince says to Maitlis: “I think that went rather well….”

Scoop sweeps the viewer into the drama of the backstory revealing the knife-edge the Newsnight team walked, worrying constantly that the interview would be pulled by “Mummy” or by the BBC’s Director General or by the prince himself, none of whom appears to have seen the iceberg.

A renegade wing of the Beeb organised a daring raid deep inside the monarchy with terrible consequences for the Palace. One thing is certain: Newsnight or its equivalent will never be allowed such access again.

Photo: Gillian Anderson, who plays Emily Maitlis, attends a New York Screening of Netflix Film Scoop at NeueHouse Madison Square, New York City, US, 3 April 2024. (Photo by Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for Netflix.)

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