A Very Royal Scandal

Prince Andrew’s infamous Newsnight interview entered the annals of television history precisely because it was a car-crash comedy of errors played out in real-time. Re-enacting such iconic interviews in the form of scripted television is, therefore, always a precarious undertaking. Michael Sheen has been here before, having played the titular journalist in Ron Howard’s Frost/Nixon, which was essentially a facsimile of the original interviews (save for the odd moments of artistic license via Frank Langella’s Machiavellian Nixon). But A Very Royal Scandal, Amazon Prime’s three-part miniseries, succeeds where Frost/Nixon failed and is, thankfully, so much more than a mere word-for-word iteration of Prince Andrew’s darkest hour.

Ruth Sheen excels as Emily Maitlis, the BBC journalist who – much to her delight – got more than she bargained for when she sat down with the prince on 16^th November 2019. We see the virtue of her craft behind the scenes, as she spends painstaking hours researching the enigma that is the Problem Prince.

But A Very Royal Scandal is by no means an excoriation of the prince (he did that himself the moment he sat down for the interview). Wilson’s Maitlis is very much the star here, and it’s fascinating to watch the brilliant methods with which she ensnares her subject (here, Maitlis also serves as executive producer).

Andrew’s arc is a tale of unbridled arrogance and privilege, the likes of which led him to believe that he could successfully explain away multiple glaring lapses in moral judgment. By the end of it, and given the enormity of his ego, one can’t help but wonder whether he ever realised the gravity of his televised transgressions. And, it must be said, did he ever view his fumbling and obfuscations as failings at all?

Throughout it all, Sheen, who offers up his best impersonation to date, tries to find the humanity in the disgraced prince. As he explained in a post-screening Q&A, “It was the footage of Andrew when he came back from the Falklands on the dockside with a rose in his mouth. I’m thinking, ‘That’s about as good a moment as you’re ever gonna get …’ And it was sort of downhill from there, wasn’t it?” Prince Andrew’s Newsnight interview may have been a car crash, but A Very Royal Scandal is anything but. Thoroughly entertaining and expertly acted, it’s an illuminating revisit of a much-digested chapter in television history.

Antonia Georgiou

A Very Royal Scandal is released on Prime Video on 19^th September 2024.

Watch the trailer for A Very Royal Scandal here: