She bagged a prized interview with Prince Andrew. Now it’s a Netflix movie

Anyone with the most trifling interest in television, public life, news journalism, the Epstein scandal, the royal family or pretty much anything that pockmarks the zeitgeist will have seen the 2019 BBC interview between Emily Maitlis and Prince Andrew.

If you like fearless interrogation, it’s here as Maitlis picks apart the prince’s relationship with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. If you like outlandish comedy, it’s here too, with Andrew’s ludicrous answers about how he was physically incapable of sweating, or how he had the perfect alibi for a supposed assignation with a 17-year-old arranged by Epstein – because at the time he was taking his daughter to Pizza Express.

Sam McAlister, the Newsnight booker who bagged the interview with Prince Andrew.Credit: Peter Mountain/Netflix

Like any good storytelling drawn from real life, Netflix’s dramatisation Scoop looks for the characters you haven’t heard of as much as the ones you have. So yes, there’s Gillian Anderson delivering a pitch-perfect, cut-glass-vowelled Emily Maitlis (one of the BBC’s most august political interviewers) and yes, there’s Rufus Sewell doing a Prince Andrew so uncannily brilliant that they had to alter the prosthetics in order to stop viewers being unduly distracted by his face. But front and centre, this is Sam McAlister’s story, and if that has you going, “Sam who?” then that’s precisely the point.

Gillian Anderson as Emily Maitlis and Rufus Sewell as Prince Andrew in Scoop.Credit: Netflix

McAlister, who is played by Billie Piper, was the booker on the prestige British political show Newsnight who bagged the prize interview. Members of the British royal family don’t normally give interviews (“Never explain, never complain” is a long-time Windsor mantra).

But, as Scoop tells it, when McAlister got an email from the palace in November 2018 saying Andrew might be up for a conversation about a new charity he was launching, the booker sniffed an opening.

“I think the greatest misconception about the interview is, ‘it just happened,’” she says, speaking in London. “Some people will probably be thinking: ‘Well, I’ve already seen the interview, why do I want to watch Scoop?’ But I always get asked a different question once people know I was involved: ‘How did this happen?’ That really is the question that this film answers: it’s the other 95 per cent before the thing that everybody is familiar with. Here we get to put that other 95 per cent in a dramatic context.”

That context, refreshingly, is of how a coterie of diligent, capable and fair-minded women combined to confront a hubristic man with his own actions. Scoop is very much a women’s story, even though its most famous image is of a very famous (though entirely sweat-free) man.

“These women exist in real life,” says Anderson, who plays Emily Maitlis, “and they are women in a field that has been traditionally male-dominated [broadcast journalism]. Having a story about their experience and having journalists like Emily Maitlis represented in film is important. What I love about this film is that all of the women sit prominently in the story – you see them all working together to bring this interview to light.”

If Scoop shows how the Prince Andrew interview happened, it also offers answers to the second great question that the Newsnight special left hanging: why did he do it? The film leaves the viewer to their conclusions, but Sam McAlister (an expert, of course, in why people will and won’t go on camera) has her own theories.

“I think it’s two things. First of all, no one thinks they’re going to do a bad interview. Secondly, there is an ego element to interviews. Many powerful people think that not only are they not going to do a bad interview, but they’re probably going to do an excellent one.

“In his very difficult position, my impression is that he felt he would be able to eradicate the perception of him that had built up over the Epstein scandal by doing this interview.”

Sam McAlister (right) with Billie Piper, who depicts her in the Netflix drama Scoop.Credit: Peter Mountain/Netflix

If both McAlister and Maitlis come out of Scoop looking resplendent, even Prince Andrew’s private secretary at the time Amanda Thirsk – played by Keeley Hawes – gets a fair hearing. Although she is shown as instrumental in the meetings and emails that led to the disastrous interview for her boss, she is neither an idiot nor a patsy.

According to Sam McAlister, who worked closely with Thirsk throughout: “Andrew let her down.”

“Amanda is an extremely intelligent, competent, capable, brilliant woman; I have nothing but praise for her. She was nobody’s fool. She was not a pushover.

“But she did believe in Andrew, as many people do about their bosses. And that belief turned out to be misplaced in terms of his answers.”

What I love about this film is that all of the women sit prominently in the story.

Gillian Anderson, who plays Emily Maitlis

It was left to Rufus Sewell to provide those unforgettable responses.

“I had a strong take on what I thought was going on with him,” says Sewell. “I’ve made my own personal decisions and judgments which I will keep to myself. But as far as I was concerned, I just had to not think about how it would be received because the danger is people are either going to say that it’s one-sided in terms of favouring him, or having too much sympathy, or vice versa. You can’t think about that.”

Pushed on why he thinks Andrew chose to do the interview at all, Sewell says: “I think he feels a genuine sense of victimhood, and how not fair everything is, which is quite palpable. It’s also a very, very limited imagination as to the humanity of other people.

“I think he has enormous compassion and sympathy … for himself. He honestly felt, I think, that the interview could be a silver bullet to make people understand the real him.”

As Scoop shows, people did indeed come out of the interview with a much greater understanding of the real Prince Andrew. It was just not the one he wanted.

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