Photo: Christopher Raphael/Blueprint/Sony Pictures Television
In November 2019, after years of rumors surrounding his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein — and accusations that he had intercourse with the 17-year-old alleged trafficking sufferer Virginia Giuffre — rose to new prominence after the disgraced financier’s loss of life, Prince Andrew determined to clear the air. He sat down for a 49-minute interview with journalist Emily Maitlis, the brilliantly combative host of the night current-affairs program Newsnight, throughout which he mentioned he didn't remorse his relationship with Epstein. This amongst stranger tidbits that shortly turned piss-taking memes: that he couldn’t sweat as a result of of an adrenaline malfunction, for one, and extra notoriously, that he couldn't have slept with Giuffre on the date she alleged as a result of he was at a pizza celebration in the provincial city of Woking. As most will recall — this occurred lower than 5 years in the past — it didn't go nicely for the queen’s favourite son: He was quickly suspended from public duties and later resigned from all of his public roles.
Andrew’s alleged ties to Epstein went again years. Perhaps such is why every episode of A Very Royal Scandal, which remembers the occasions earlier than, throughout, and after the interview came about, opens with the sound of ticking, a reputational bomb ready to blow. It’s the third installment of the loosely related A Very X Scandal collection, which started in 2018 with the Hugh Grant–starring story of Jeremy Thorpe, a member of Parliament accused of having a homosexual affair with a youthful man he then was additional accused of conspiring to homicide. The allegations the new collection offers with are abhorrent, which is straightforward to neglect amid the absurdity of all of it, however it’s laborious to disclaim the tabloid attraction of such lewd melodrama — a royal prince accused of intercourse crimes amid ties to America’s most infamous sexual predator.
Lest we neglect that A Very Royal Scandal wasn’t even the first to dramatize this notably grim second in current monarchical reminiscence. Netflix was first to the Andrew affair with an hour-and-40-minute-long movie known as Scoop, which starred Gillian Anderson as Maitlis in the lead-up to the interview that destroyed Prince Andrew’s familial, skilled, and social standing. (He was performed by Rufus Sewell. Both transformations have been eerily near their topics.) Scoop got here out in April this 12 months and was met with a lukewarm crucial response as one other product of streaming-age churn, and few have talked about it since.
Nevertheless, A Very Royal Scandal is right here, and the first episode serves to jog our recollections of occasions that occurred so not too long ago and have been final changed into mild leisure simply 5 months in the past. Whereas in Scoop we noticed the buildup to — and penalties of — the Andrew interview largely from the viewpoint of a streetwise TV producer performed by Billie Piper, her character is right here relegated to the background in favor of Maitlis and Andrew, whose backstories are coloured all through the episode. This time, they're performed by Luther and The Affair’s Ruth Wilson and the chameleonic Michael Sheen, who collects public figures to play like Pokémon. (He portrayed the journalist David Frost in Frost/Nixon, the soccer — ugh, soccer — supervisor Brian Clough in The Damned United, and Prime Minister Tony Blair in three totally different motion pictures.)
Much of the cause folks will watch this present, I believe, will probably be to see how Wilson and Sheen painting their topics as a result of transformation is half of the promote with this stuff: With Lincoln, what we actually wished to see was Daniel Day-Lewis grow to be the famously top-hatted president, and if there was any attraction to look at Darkest Hour, it was in the synthetic fattening of Gary Oldman, whose make-up and array of prosthetics paid no small half in successful him an Oscar. By the finish of The Crown, was there something extra thrilling than the duel of the Dianas? We simply love impressions, even when the topics are a well-known newsreader and disgraced royal. So, how reworked are they? This is a topic we’ll return to with the re-creation of the notorious interview to come back (spoiler alert, however it was at all times going to be re-created, and all of these episodes land directly). But, for now, Sheen seems to be like a portlier white-haired Sheen, although his mannerisms are eerily on-point; Wilson seems to be nothing like Maitlis, however the voice could be very correct, if cartoonish. I hearken to quite a bit of Maitlis’s podcast, The News Agents, and I feel I may inform them aside if I have been to pay attention with my eyes closed, however it’s marginal.
And so the episode begins in the moments simply earlier than the well-known interview takes place, a frantic affair certainly: Maitlis, late to the sit-down that can shoot her into the stratosphere, heaving baggage of spare garments in case of a last-minute wardrobe malfunction, rushes into Buckingham Palace. Meanwhile, a grandiose, grandstanding Andrew makes his means into the interview room. On his means down one of the palace’s ornate halls, his loyal aide Amanda Thirsk (Joanna Scanlan) in tow, he presents an inquiring servant a brusque “fuck off,” which we are going to come to know as a defining tic in Sheen’s efficiency. The mirror picture of the two is a subversion of how they may really feel underneath the lights of the interview. Andrew is calm, measured, dominative, combatant, and assured. Maitlis sweats. She heads to the toilet, not for a nervous wee, however to munch on some chocolate. (In an interview on The News Agents together with her co-host Lewis Goodall, Maitlis mentioned that earlier than she and Andrew started, she was largely nervous about her abdomen audibly rumbling.)
There’s a fast flashback to 2011, by which Andrew is informed by an aide that tabloid newspaper the Daily Mail is investigating his alleged assault of Giuffre — which he has conveniently forgotten about — and that they've {a photograph} taken of the pair in “what appears to be” Ghislaine Maxwell’s home. This is a person steeped in inherited privilege, of course — about the most inherited privilege one can legally purchase — and it’s very telling that he merely bats away the accusation as he would a fly buzzing round his cucumber sandwich. Any bets on this {photograph} arising later? Don’t be foolish. You can’t guess on (fictionalized retellings of) historic occasions!
Back to the current — 2019, to be clear — and Maitlis is listening to a radio report about Theresa May’s doomed Brexit deal whereas her husband will get the children prepared for varsity. Later, in a pitching session at the BBC, the query of an interview with Andrew comes up; Maitlis argues in favor of it, however provided that Epstein is on the desk. We get to know Maitlis as a hard-hitting information obsessive who, like a lot of the British public by the finish of the 2010s, is drained of the monotony of Brexit and is unafraid of holding her friends to account on Newsnight, even when a innocent eye roll lands her in scorching water. “I got a bit stroppy,” she tells her doting husband of the irritated blunder when she comes dwelling at God is aware of what time, fixing herself an ice-cold glass of vodka. The present doesn't draw back from drawing parallels between Maitlis and Andrew, and this fiery sense of public scrutiny is one thing they've each felt.
Another distinguished parallel happens in the depiction of their home lives, as we additionally spend a while with Andrew’s quick (and extra well-known) household: his kids Princess Beatrice (Honor Swinton Byrne) and Princess Eugenie (Sofia Oxenham) and his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson (Claire Rushbrook). We meet the children at an occasion for Andrew’s pet challenge, Pitch @ Palace, which he arrange as a community for budding youth entrepreneurs in the U.Okay. The impact is to humanize Andrew, and it’s notable in the first episode that Sheen’s efficiency doesn't betray a way of whether or not the actor thinks his topic is responsible; maybe it could be straightforward to painting him as an odious ogre, however in these scenes, he’s simply an embarrassing dad (who occurs to be the son of the then-sitting monarch, however y’know). Later on, as Maitlis researches Andrew’s monetary ties to Epstein, a flashback to December 2010 depicts Andrew assembly Epstein — yeah, a man performs Epstein, ugh — in his New York mansion to ask him for cash to assist Ferguson with a debt, earlier than they're photographed taking a stroll in the park. By this level, as Andrew mentions, Epstein had already been convicted of baby prostitution in Florida.
In the current, once more, Epstein is discovered lifeless, as Andrew is knowledgeable over the cellphone by Thirsk. “Is this good for me or bad,” he asks in one other line telling of his self-interest. Later, it will get a lot worse, as an investigation for the Channel 4 documentary collection Dispatches — the episode was in real-life titled “The Prince and the Paedophile” — lays naked the ties between Andrew and his now lifeless buddy. With the escalating demand for a PR antidote, Thirsk means that they rethink the concept of the Newsnight interview with no pink tape round the Epstein query. Oh, the bitter irony: His publicist, who rightly thinks it’s a horrible concept to place the naïve prince in entrance of a famously scathing journalist for an hour, will get the sack for having the temerity to level any of this out, and so the wheels flip towards the interview of a lifetime. Maitlis and her crew meet with Thirsk and Andrew, who brings alongside Beatrice — his daughter, however maybe extra necessary for optics in the room, one other lady. At the finish of the assembly, Andrew asks if any of the BBC crew have been victims of abuse. It’s a curious second: a narcissist’s carried out try at empathy, maybe? Not even. He simply needs to ensure that Maitlis isn’t overly biased for his accuser.
Soon after Maitlis and the BBC crew depart, phrase comes by way of that the interview has been accredited, which can occur days from now, they usually rush off to organize. (Wilson brilliantly handles an trade with Maitlis’s editor over which pair of excessive heels to put on throughout the interview, deciding on the pair that can most agitate the tabloids: “Fuck the Mail, sexy heels it is!”) But the episode ends on a cliffhanger — nicely, it could be if we didn’t already know that the interview finally went forward — with the reveal that the BBC investigative collection Panorama has an upcoming episode by which Giuffre remembers her encounter with Andrew. (“She says he sweats like a pig” being one quoted line that properly foreshadows Andrew’s much-meme’d declare to come back that he can’t sweat in any respect.) It received’t air till after the interview, but when it’s leaked, the interview will certainly be off.
In the meantime, Andrew heads for a night horse trip with Beatrice. “People forget, I’ve been to war,” he boasts. “I promise you — I’m going to blow this out of the water.”
