Emily Maitlis has now watched both Gillian Anderson and Ruth Wilson portray her onscreen in the space of just six months.
The former BBC Newsnight presenter is renowned in British journalism but to many around the globe, she might be more recognizable as the woman who sat down with a seemingly nervous Prince Andrew in 2019 to probe the royal family member on his relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Prime Video‘s A Very Royal Scandal, airing exclusively on Amazon on Sept. 19, follows the infamous interview, how it came to fruition, and the aftermath. The three-episode series — which, unlike Netflix, boasts Maitlis as executive producer — more closely follows the two characters at the heart of the story: a reporter intent on unearthing the truth in Maitlis and the late Queen’s second son, who finds himself desperate to broadcast his version of events and unwittingly further derails the public’s relationship with the monarchy.
Michael Sheen (Good Omens, Twilight, Masters of Sex) stars alongside Wilson (The Affair, Luther), who speaks to the Duke of York about accusations he had sex with teenager Virginia Giuffre (then Roberts) at Epstein’s house when she was just 17 in the early 2000s (the Duke later settled out of court for an undisclosed fee). It is the second dramatization of the disastrous interview to air in six months — Netflix’s Scoop, which dropped in April with Gillian Anderson and Rufus Sewell at the helm, also found 2024 to be the year to re-tell this story. Why now?
Ruth Wilson as Emily Maitlis and Michael Sheen as Prince Andrew in ‘A Very Royal Scandal.’
Prime Video
“Well, it will be five years in November [since the interview],” Maitlis tells The Hollywood Reporter. “And we are still trying to examine the fallout of that interview, that clash between two institutions — the BBC and the royal family. And I guess one of the questions we’re asking in A Very Royal Scandal is: did it reset the public’s relationship with the royal family?”
“I remember, a month after the interview, watching [Queen Elizabeth II’s] Christmas speech,” she continues. “And she gave it in front of the piano where normally there would have been loads and loads of family photographs… It was very noticeable that the whole thing had been slimmed down. There were three photos.”
Nothing has ever been spoken out loud, Maitlis notes, but it’s glaringly obvious that the now-King, Charles, has opted for a trimmed monarchy. The departure of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle is partly to blame, but for Maitlis, screenwriter Jeremy Brock put a bright spotlight on Andrew’s involvement. “I think it’s hard to divide yourself between projects,” she begins on opting for A Very Royal Scandal over Scoop. “I guess I threw myself into the Amazon project because I’d met Jeremy and I really liked his work. I got to know Ruth incredibly well. I loved Michael Sheen. So it became just a really easy choice for me. I think you have to immerse yourself into the thing that feels like the right project for you.”
Brock did his research — and then some — on how that fateful November night came to be. “What I loved about Jeremy as the writer was that it wasn’t just my version [of events],” Maitlis says. “He went round and he talked to so many members of the original Newsnight team. And so you’ve got this really rich recollection where each of the different team members told Jeremy stuff, some of which I didn’t even know beforehand.”
The interview on YouTube now has over 10 million views. It is difficult to know exactly how the Duke reacted upon witnessing the fallout, but Maitlis guesses it was only when he saw the headlines the next day, that he understood what had happened. “There’s a very easy way to tell in broadcasting, actually, if your interviewee is unhappy with an interview,” she divulges. “They can’t wait to get out of there. If you apply that rule to what happened in the palace afterwards… Prince Andrew was incredibly relaxed, generous with his time, wanted to shoot lots of B-roll, wanted to give us a guided tour of the palace.”
“If I told you that after the interview and after the walking shots, he wanted to talk us through his great uncle, Prince Albert, the entrepreneur, and he invited us back to the palace at the time. None of those things would have happened if he’d been unhappy,” Maitlis continues. “But I think that the the turning point for Andrew and for Amanda [Thirsk, the Duke’s former private secretary] was actually not even when the interview went out. It was only when they saw the headlines in the press the next day that it suddenly sunk in. And I think that does speak to this sense of, they’re all sort of living in a slightly different world, not realizing that some of those lines wouldn’t land well with the public. It was almost the brutality of the press spelling it out and putting it on the front page that they kind of went: ‘Oh.’”
It won’t surprise viewers that Maitlis and Prince Andrew have not spoken directly since the interview. But a month after it aired, she was pulled aside by someone close to the then-Prince Charles. “This person said: ‘I think you should know that HRH [His Royal Highness] was not unhappy with the interview.’ I remember being stunned and trying to interpret what that might mean.”
Maitlis considers that the comment either meant Charles does not blame her for the interview, or that simply: “‘We get it.’ Senior royals knew that it had to happen in order for the reset to happen, or for a realignment and a reappraisal of the royal family with the British public, [they] get that that had to happen. I don’t know to this day, but I was definitely being passed a message in that comment that day.”
Wilson as Maitlis in ‘A Very Royal Scandal’.
Maitlis confirm her and Wilson were inseparable for a lot of the time in the lead-up to filming so the actress could best embody the news presenter — rollers in hair, husky voice, and all. The pair drank martinis together, hung out at Maitlis’ house and went through her wardrobe. “I spilled my heart out to Ruth,” she says. “She knew everything about me. She knew about the vodka and the wine gums that I keep in the freezer. She knew the contents of my handbag, because she literally borrowed my handbag. She knew about what happens after I come off air, the conversations with my husband and the things that happen at home.”
“She had so much of me to work off, to bring all the authenticity that she does. And frankly, she is astonishing. When I watch her, I can feel my cheeks getting warm because I think, ‘Oh my God, she’s absolutely nailed it.’”
But Wilson didn’t want Maitlis on set while filming. Wilson tells THR: “Emily trusted me. It’s an interpretation, it’s not an imitation entirely. She trusted me to take her and the essence of her and serve the story in that way… I’d never played a public person before. That was part of why I took the job, because I wanted the challenge of that. And she’s very complex, as every human being is, so it was really fun to investigate her physically, vocally, but also, what’s going on in the show.”
Getting to see Anderson and Wilson portray you onscreen in the space of six months is the stuff of one’s “wildest dreams”, Maitlis admits. It’s no wonder two heavyweights were cast for these fictionalizations; the interview shook the world, and Maitlis knows it. The interview can be seen as a battle of institutions — the BBC and the royal family — and, she hopes, a demonstration of both the powers and limits of journalism.
“We saw what it did to Andrew’s life,” the journalist adds. “We saw what it did to his reputation. We saw him lose his standing with the British public. We saw him lose royal duties. We saw him lose millions in that loss, in that settlement.”
“But ultimately, the story isn’t finished, because we still don’t know the guilt or innocence. There will never be a trial. There isn’t closure. We don’t know where it’s left the victims of Epstein. And we don’t know what it’s done for Virginia Giuffre.”
A Very Royal Scandal premieres exclusively on Prime Video in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand on Sept. 19.
