A Very Royal Scandal's Ruth Wilson and Michael Sheen on bringing an "extraordinary" interview to life

The actor is talking about the interview scene at the heart of A Very Royal Scandal, the three-part Prime Video dramatisation of Emily Maitlis’s 2019 Newsnight encounter with Prince Andrew, in which Sheen plays the errant prince and Ruth Wilson is Maitlis.

"It was just an extraordinary thing," says Sheen. "I think both of us have watched that interview possibly more than anyone else in the world." Wilson agrees: "I said those lines to myself at home, over and over again."

Recorded at Buckingham Palace with the 59-year-old prince’s full and perhaps unwise cooperation on 14th November and broadcast on BBC Two two nights later, at 9pm on Saturday, the interview astonished the world and brought Maitlis international fame.

It also effectively ended Andrew’s public life. When Maitlis repeated Virginia Giuffre’s claim that she was forced to have sex with the duke in London when she was 17, with the connivance of the American paedophile Jeffrey Epstein and his associate (and Andrew’s longtime friend), British heiress Ghislaine Maxwell, Andrew claimed it was impossible, as he was at a children’s party at a Pizza Express in Woking.

He also refuted Giuffre’s observation that he perspired heavily because, following service in the Falklands War, he was unable to sweat.

Wilson’s face when Sheen’s Andrew says this is a study in suppressed contempt. Just as Sheen doesn’t look like Andrew, Wilson lacks Maitlis’s bone-thin features, yet she appears to utterly inhabit the journalist she is playing. "I had lots of meetings with Emily," says Wilson, perhaps best known for her role as Mrs Coulter in His Dark Materials, of her preparation for the role.

"I went to her house for dinner, I visited her at the office of The News Agents [the podcast Maitlis co-presents with Jon Sopel and Lewis Goodall]. Emily is incredibly smart and charming. She lives off Percy Pigs and wine gums and she was eating them at the office with her hair in rollers."

Not quite the ice maiden her barrister-like dismantling of Andrew might suggest, then? "She’s clumsy, she’d admit that," says Wilson, 42. "She has ink everywhere, on her clothes, on her mouth, because she chews her pens. She also gave me one of her handbags and the lining was covered in pen ink. I wanted to put 'Ruth was here'.

"I used that bag on set. She was giving me her stuff to wear, it was like the school play. She gave me the military-style jacket she wore for the interview; I could actually smell Emily on me."

There was no smell of Andrew for Sheen. "God, no," says the 55-year-old actor. "I had no help at all. Usually, you’re trying to get certain props or clothing you know the character would wear, but it was quite difficult to get people to give you things because of the association."

A Very Royal Scandal comes soon after the Netflix film covering much of the same territory, Scoop, starring Gillian Anderson as Emily Maitlis and Rufus Sewell as Prince Andrew.

"I didn’t watch it," says Wilson. "Gillian’s brilliant, so I didn’t want to be intimidated by what she was doing." And Sheen? "I watched it immediately and I was completely intimidated by Rufus! But I was also very relieved, because it was very different to what we were doing.

"Their main character is Sam McAlister [Newsnight’s producer, played by Billie Piper]. Andrew and Emily are the main characters in our story and it explores the aftermath more. How did this interview affect the lives of these people and what did it lead to?"

There are also dramatic revelations. Remarkably, some of Andrew’s most damning remarks were added at the end of the interview at his team’s request. "I find that extraordinary," says Sheen. "The Pizza Express and the not sweating stuff, you’d think that was the worst part of it – and they were the things he wanted in there!"

A Very Royal Scandal, scripted by BAFTA–winning screenwriter Jeremy Brock and directed by Julian Jarrold, is also concerned with the many collateral victims of the scandal, including Andrew’s daughters, Princesses Eugenie and Beatrice.

And, in a way Scoop didn’t, it asks wider, existential questions about the monarchy. "It’s about a bigger story of entitlement," says Wilson, who has an MBE (Sheen returned his OBE in 2017 so he would be free to speak about the royal family). "Even if I see the value of the royal family, I still think we need to hold it to account."

The two shows have different ambitions, but that famous interview is central to both. The bulk of the filming, says Wilson, was done over one intense day.

"It was great, thrilling. Everyone came off on a high after doing it." Sheen compares it to playing David Frost in Frost/Nixon: "You’re replicating interviews, and when we came to do the actual takes, you’re aware that everyone is watching you and going, 'Right, does this work or not?'"

It works. Sheen, famed for bringing real-life characters like Tony Blair and Brian Clough to life, pulls it off once more. His Andrew is a grossly self-entitled and cloth-eared royal; perhaps a monster, but also a man suddenly seeing everything he understands to be his birthright under threat.

"The big challenge with characters who are possibly doing repulsive or repugnant or morally reprehensible things is, can an audience tolerate feeling like they’re looking out from behind that character’s eyes?" says Sheen. "There are people who feel sympathetic towards Prince Andrew. The vast majority, I think, feel another way."

When I ask if he feels any sympathy or at least empathy for Andrew, Sheen, previously at ease, stiffens slightly. "Sympathy has an element of forgiveness or excuse, of justification," he says.

"Empathy is about being able to see someone’s actions within a context and therefore having a sense of understanding how those actions or choices might be possible. That’s quite different to feeling forgiving of those choices."

Because of the intensity of her engagement with Sheen’s performance, I wonder if Wilson has a more nuanced view of Andrew than she did immediately after the Newsnight interview. "Maybe I do," she says. "Working opposite Michael, and watching it [the series], I thought, 'God, they’ve done such an extraordinary job of [portraying] the complexity of this human being and the world in which he’s grown up.' Perhaps it does make me think differently."

And Sheen? "There is a huge mystery at the heart of it, because we don’t know what did or didn’t happen. We may have very strong instincts about it, but we don’t know. There hasn’t been a court case. There hasn’t been a judgement in that sense."

But Sheen must have made a judgement, guilty or innocent? "I had to make a choice for myself because I couldn’t just leave it misty. I had to know who this man was, and what he’d done or not done. But I have no idea if the choice I made is right or not, which is why I won’t say."

The interview was disastrous for Andrew, leading to public ridicule and effective abandonment by the royal family. Though, at the time, he acted as if it had gone well.

"We expect people who we cast as the bad guy to act in a certain kind of way," says Wilson. "I think Emily herself seemed a little bit wrong-footed by the fact that he didn’t come across in the way she expected. At the end of the interview, he seemed happy with it."

Virginia Giuffre’s lawsuit against Prince Andrew was settled out of court in February 2022. Though never confirmed, the settlement figure was reported to be as much as £12 million, some of which was said to have been paid by Queen Elizabeth.

Whether the pay-off was an admission of guilt or simply the royal family trying to kill the story before Jubilee year is something that A Very Royal Scandal encourages us to consider ourselves. Either way, the irrevocable damage was done in November 2019.

"What amazed me was the stakes of the situation are so high for both of them," says Wilson. "Emily’s only got an hour – she’s got to get him." And, as we now know, she got him.

A Very Royal Scandal will stream on Amazon Prime Video from 19th September 2024 – try Amazon Prime Video for free for 30 days. Plus, read our guides to the best Amazon Prime series and the best movies on Amazon Prime.

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