Prince Andrew drama heads to big screen
It was the interview that confirmed the Duke of York’s downfall. Now the story behind his infamous BBC grilling will be dramatised in a film.
It was the interview that confirmed the Duke of York’s downfall. Now the story behind his infamous BBC Newsnight grilling is to be dramatised in a film.
Work is under way on the project after producers secured the rights to Scoops, a book by the woman who secured Emily Maitlis’s extraordinary encounter with Prince Andrew in 2019.
Sam McAlister was Newsnight’s interviews producer and her book dedicates space to each of her interview bookings, including Julian Assange and Steven Seagal.
Hailed as the scoop of the year, the Andrew interview featured revelations about the duke’s relationship with the billionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted of child sex trafficking and has been sentenced to 20 years in jail.
Peter Moffat, the writer of the BBC One drama Silk and Sky’s Your Honor, has begun work on a script that will take audiences behind the scenes of the interview. Producers are hoping to tell the story with the same dramatic flair as Frost/Nixon, the 2008 dramatisation of the Watergate interviews between David Frost and Richard Nixon, based on the 2006 stage play of the same name.
The question of who will play Andrew, 62, and Maitlis, 51, is yet to be answered, though the producers are thought to have drawn up a shortlist of names for each role.
Deadline, the American entertainment industry website, reported that Hugh Grant, 61, was being considered, though he has not so far been approached. The actor denied that he was interested in playing Andrew. “Never heard of it,” he tweeted yesterday (Thursday).
The film about Andrew, who in March paid a settlement without admitting liability to Virginia Giuffre, who had accused him of sexual assault, will be unwelcome news for Buckingham Palace, which has tried to draw a line under the Epstein affair. Andrew has consistently denied wrongdoing.
The Queen still includes him in family events but his military titles and royal patronages have been removed. He was due to be at the Queen’s side during her Platinum Jubilee celebrations but tested positive for Covid.
During the Newsnight interview, filmed at Buckingham Palace and broadcast in November 2019, Andrew insisted that he had no memory of meeting Giuffre, who alleged that she was trafficked to have sex with him when she was 17.
The duke did not apologise to Epstein’s victims but admitted that he was wrong to have maintained a friendship with the American financier after he was jailed for procuring an under-age girl for prostitution. “I kick myself on a daily basis,” he said. Epstein was found hanged in his prison cell in August 2019; he had been awaiting trial on charges of sex trafficking.
McAlister, a former criminal barrister, said: “I was sitting there, 15ft behind him in Buckingham Palace. Everything that was being said felt almost like you were in some kind of Shakespearean tragedy. It was such a surreal filmic experience, but I never imagined for one moment it would be an actual filmic experience.”
She said that casting decisions had once been a dinner party talking point, but were now a reality before production beginning in November. Asked who she would like to play herself in the film, McAlister joked that she had once been compared to both Nicole Kidman and Charlie Sheen in drag in the reader comments section of a newspaper website.
McAlister said: “The interview itself was obviously beyond anything that any of us had ever seen in the public realm. And so it has left an indelible effect on the monarchy, on Prince Andrew, but also on future interviews. No one will ever do an interview like this again.”
Moffat told Deadline that it was a source of “thrilling” drama. The writer said he wanted to tell the story of how “Sam and those two extraordinary women, Emily and Esme [Wren, the Newsnight editor], made the interview happen under stress and pressure”.
The film is being produced by The Lighthouse Film and Television, a production company co-founded by Hilary Salmon, a former BBC executive. She was involved in creating the detective series Luther, starring Idris Elba. Voltage TV is co-producing the film.
Buckingham Palace declined to comment.
The Times
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