Earlier this year, Netflix treated us to “Scoop”, a shape-shifting dramatisation of Prince Andrew’s stunning foot-in-mouth interview on BBC’s “Newsnight” in 2019, in which he catastrophically failed to deflect accusations that he had sex with Virginia Giuffre at Jeffrey Epstein’s house when she was 17.
Six months on, Amazon Prime is rolling out its own take with “A Very Royal Scandal”, executive produced by Emily Maitlis, the interviewer in the jaw-dropping TV special, which treated us to details of Andrew’s inability to sweat and a trip to Woking’s Pizza Express.
‘A hall of mirrors’
Amazon’s take on one of the royal family’s worst moments is told through the eyes of Maitlis, played by Ruth Wilson. Michael Sheen plays Andrew as “pompous, deluded and deeply unpleasant”, said Kate Mansey in The Times. He’s shown “striding around” Buckingham Palace, swearing at people as freely as others say good morning.
His first scene sees him bark “‘f*** off’ (to a footman who dares to approach)”. He calls his dogs “little buggers”, the Queen’s press secretary “a little shit” and his aide Amanda Thirsk, played by Joanna Scanlan, “a fatty”.
In one scene, after the then Prince Charles finds out about the “Newsnight” disaster and calls his brother to remonstrate with him, Andrew shouts: “Calls me a f***ing mummy’s boy! He is the f***ing mummy’s boy!”
Sheen told The Hollywood Reporter‘s Lily Ford that “it’s a hall of mirrors with Prince Andrew”, that there’s “a mystery at the heart” of who he is – and, “what he did or didn’t do”.
Before each episode, we are reminded that while this drama is based on real people and events, some scenes have been adapted or fictionalised for dramatic purposes. But, to many, this portrayal of Charles’ problem sibling, will ring only too true.
A ‘satiated market’
The Andrew problem continues to wreak a real-time impact on a family that has had an exceedingly difficult run of it in recent years. Andrew stepped down as a working member of the royal family after the “Newsnight” debacle. In the latest turn of events, King Charles has been applying pressure on his younger sibling to vacate his lavish 30-room Grade II listed home, Royal Lodge in Windsor’s Great Park, for the more humble Frogmore Cottage, once home to Harry and Meghan before they escaped the royal circus for a sunnier life in California.
Although Charles is coughing up for the rent himself as Andrew no longer has recourse to public funds, it’s “still a public sign of support for a man who was friends with a convicted paedophile and has never acknowledged his lack of judgment over that friendship”, said Mansey.
For Sheen, there is a fascination in playing a man who was “so popular, thousands of women shouting and screaming” when he came back from the Falklands War with a rose in his mouth, he said in The Hollywood Reporter. “To see a man age, put on weight and start losing all that whilst getting further and further away from the centre of power”, that “contradiction is golden for an actor”.
But for Grazia‘s Nikki Peach, this is a “satiated market” and a story that has been told in any number of different ways already, including Channel 4’s “Prince Andrew: The Musical”, and a series of documentaries. While it was a “groundbreaking, compelling and critically acclaimed interview”, there’s something “disheartening about the fact it’s still seen as fertile ground for TV and film”. And as for the Prince, while he refuses to up sticks across the park, it is clear that he has suffered notably “few material consequences”.
“A Very Royal Scandal” will be available for streaming on Amazon Prime from 19 September