It’s been interesting to watch everything around Scoop, the Netflix movie about what happened behind the scenes of Prince Andrew’s infamous 2019 Newsnight interview. If we were talking about The Crown, the Windsors and the royalist media would have thrown a weeks-long tantrum about how much they hate Netflix. But the royalists just sort of ignored everything about Scoop for the most part. There was some chatter among the royal commentators, but no big Daily Mail excoriating Andrew OR Netflix. I think part of it is because the film is pretty straight-forward and it makes everyone involved look bad, including the BBC (unintentionally, which is even funnier). And the performances are actually quite gentle – I thought Rufus Sewell did a perfectly adequate job as Andrew, and I would even say all of the interview scenes are really very good and he’ll probably get nominated for some awards. As Sewell has promoted Scoop, he’s tried to avoid saying anything too bad or too pointed about Andrew or the Windsors, but he code-switched a little bit while chatting with the NY Times:
[Sewell] said he was aware of the risks inherent to this type of role. “I have a kind of nightmare version of the performance that I’m giving that I run madly from,” he said. “In my head it was this weskit-wearing prince regent, a parody, you know, that I was frightened of.” The right performance, he added, was in “the uncanny valley between me and him.”
Becoming the duke the right way, Sewell said, began with studying Andrew, “which really was just obsessively watching and trying to get behind what I could see.” Though he insists he is “not a natural mimic,” he came to learn Andrew’s interview at the most granular level, memorizing every stutter and every hesitation, scrutinizing them for some deeper meaning. “I obsessed to the point of driving myself insane,” he said. “And then when I thought I’d got it, I’d watch the original again and be struck by something I’d missed. That can go on forever.”
The interview itself is notable for its apparent civility, even courteousness. The duke isn’t grilled or antagonized; Maitlis isn’t especially confrontational, simply giving her subject enough rope to hang himself. The film’s director, Philip Martin, noted that the interview “doesn’t have that ‘A Few Good Men’ or ‘Frost/Nixon’ moment where there’s some factual smoking gun, or some line of dialogue that does it.” Instead, he said, “We got a portrait of a person through the interview. That’s why it’s had the impact that it has.”
It was also an astonishingly far cry from the royal family’s media-savvy approach of prior decades, and its longtime motto “Never complain, never explain.” Rather, the duke’s BBC appearance is an hourlong exercise in complaining and explaining. In the film, the duke’s private secretary, Amanda Thirsk (Keeley Hawes), urges the duke to speak to the BBC because she believes an open conversation will endear him to the British public. But the public is outraged.
Sewell said he saw all this as symptomatic of a kind of hereditary delusion in the royal family. Why would the duke, who is Queen Elizabeth II’s second son, think it’s OK to fraternize with Epstein? Because he likes Epstein. How could he possibly think people would believe such lame excuses? Because he thinks he’s convincing, or else that people are stupid. “He’s been lead to believe that he’s shockingly inappropriate in a hilarious way, a lot of fun, naughty, sometimes just devastatingly handsome,” Sewell said.
The power of the BBC interview, Sewell said, came from Maitlis refusing to be charmed. “His mouth gets drier and drier. His breathing becomes labored under the bonhomie,” Sewell said. “All you have to do is not play along, and he’s gasping for air.”
“His breathing becomes labored under the bonhomie…All you have to do is not play along, and he’s gasping for air.” I disagree! I think Prince Andrew and most of the Windsor clan live in their own little world, to the point where Andrew truly didn’t even realize that the interview went poorly until days after it aired. I remember it well, even if the British media wants to pretend to have a selective amnesia about it – Andrew reportedly told his mother that the interview went well after it aired (she didn’t watch it) and QEII’s courtiers were completely fine with it for days until the public pressure became too much. Then-Prince Charles basically had to call his mother and tell her that she couldn’t protect Andrew this time, that something had to be done. The fact that it took days for the “fallout” to reach Buckingham Palace tells you all you need to know about how Andrew had no idea what he had done or how he came across.
“He’s been lead to believe that he’s shockingly inappropriate in a hilarious way, a lot of fun, naughty, sometimes just devastatingly handsome” – I believe this, that Andrew’s view of himself has never been that he’s a degenerate human trafficker who pals around with pedophiles. I’ll make a somewhat unfair comparison – Prince William must think that he’s a witty raconteur whose jokes always land. He doesn’t realize that he’s seen as a very awkward egg.
Photos courtesy of Netflix, Avalon Red.