Andrew TV drama shows him asking BBC’s Maitlis if she was abused
A scene in the Amazon series A Very Royal Scandal portrays the prince as saying he would have refused the interview had any of the Newsnight team been victims.
In its immediate aftermath, Prince Andrew felt his BBC Newsnight interview had gone rather well – but as the second drama in six months looms, the misery it caused him keeps on coming.
A dramatisation of the lead-up to the program will suggest that before agreeing to appear on camera, the Duke of York asked whether anyone from the BBC team had ever been a “victim of abuse”. He knew he was to be asked about allegations from Virginia Giuffre that she was paid by Jeffrey Epstein to have sex with him when she was 17, something he has always denied.
In the upcoming Amazon Prime show A Very Royal Scandal, co-produced by the interviewer Emily Maitlis, the duke is played by Michael Sheen.
In the first episode, to air on Thursday, he puts his hand on the shoulder of Princess Beatrice – played by Tilda Swinton’s daughter Honor Swinton Byrne – before posing the question to Stewart Maclean, Newsnight deputy editor, Sam McAlister, the producer, and Maitlis.
The relevance of the question is emphasised by Andrew’s private secretary Amanda Thirsk, played by Joanna Scanlan, who says: “So your judgment wouldn’t be coloured by anything at all?”
Beatrice did indeed show up unexpectedly to the meeting with the BBC Newsnight team with a notebook and pen but Andrew and Maitlis have both declined to comment on the truth of the question in the drama, which begins with the disclaimer: “This drama is based on real events and individuals. Some scenes have been fictionalised and adapted for dramatic purposes.”
In the depiction, McAlister, played by Clare Calbraith, and McLean, played by Eanna Hardwicke, immediately say no.
Maitlis, played by Ruth Wilson, takes longer to respond but also says no. Andrew then says: “Nothing in your life?” and nods approvingly once she confirms: “Nothing at all.”
Later in the show, Maitlis is portrayed in her family home telling her husband that his question “felt horrible”, but adds: “Having a stalker is not remotely comparable”. In 2022, Maitlis’s stalker, Edward Vines, was jailed for eight years after attempting to breach a restraining order for the 20th time, following a three-decade fixation on the former BBC Newsnight presenter.
The question is one of many unflattering portrayals of the duke, who is also depicted swearing at his staff and asking Epstein, the late disgraced financier, for money.
Some scenes in A Very Royal Scandal are likely to cause embarrassing headlines, notably one in which Andrew says of Charles: “I fought for Queen and country. All he did was shag his mistress and talk to the bloody roses.” In another, he describes his older brother as a “f..king mummy’s boy”.
Speaking about dramatising real-life events, executive producer Karen Thrussell told a Q&A during a press screening of the first episode in London: “We approached it with a lot of legal advice. Every single script got sent. I mean, Jeremy (Brock, the writer) was pulling his hair out sometimes, because there’d be things that we thought were just really funny and we would not be allowed to have them. You have to be careful, because obviously we don’t want to upset people unnecessarily either.”
Dramatising recent real-life events is fraught with difficulty. Even in the Netflix portrayal Scoop, adapted from a book by McAlister – on which Maitlis has maintained a diplomatic silence – the versions of events differ. There are even debates within the former Newsnight team regarding how the interview came about.
In an interview on her podcast The News Agents, Maitlis said: “The hardest thing for me was getting other people right. The best thing actually for me in the drama was that the writer straight away went to lots of other members of the team and said: ‘Tell me your recollections.’
“That was so helpful for me, because that meant it wasn’t just my interpretation.”
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