Lauren Sarner
It was a conversation with consequences.
Michael Sheen and Ruth Wilson dramatize the famously disastrous 2019 Prince Andrew Newsnight interview in the Prime Video miniseries, “A Very Royal Scandal.”
“I watched it with a few friends and I remember being utterly gobsmacked like everyone else,” Wilson, 42, told The Post, referring to the real interview.
“The Affair” star added, “I think the question was, ‘How did that happen? How did he put himself in that position? It was kind of extraordinary. It was a defining moment of journalistic history in our country.”
Premiering Sept. 19 on Prime Video, “A Very Royal Scandal” is a three episode miniseries starring Sheen as Prince Andrew, and Wilson as Emily Maitlis, the former BBC journalist who is also an exec producer on the show.
In 2019, Prince Andrew sat down for a famously bizarre interview with Maitlis as she probed at his relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein (who died of apparent suicide earlier that year at age 66). She also pressed Prince Andrew about Virginia Giuffre’s sex abuse allegations, which he denied (and in 2022, they settled her sex abuse lawsuit out of court).
The resulting media storm led to Prince Andrew’s downfall, as he got fired from official royal duties by his mom, Queen Elizabeth II.
“In retrospect, why it’s so fascinating — and hopefully still so compelling for people — is that you realize it’s so rare that someone of power and privilege voluntarily puts themself in a position where they’re going to be made accountable,” Sheen, who is Welsh, told The Post.
The “Frost / Nixon” actor added, “Like, that just doesn’t happen. Everything [with the royal family] is so managed and controlled and disciplined… What are the various contexts that allow that clash that happened, that we watched, slack-jawed?”
The “Good Omens” star “doesn’t have an opinion” about whether the real royal family might watch “A Very Royal Scandal.”
“One of the reasons for doing it — and so relatively soon after it — is that it’s a story where there are powerful people who would like to brush it away,” he said.
“I think just by sheer dint of telling this story, it brings those issues out into the air, into the public forum to be thought about and debated again… I think it’s really important that we as a culture and a society are made to look at this again, and not for it to disappear. Even though that would suit certain people.”
Wilson spoke with the real Maitlis before the project and observed her habits.
“She gave me insights on sort of two levels. Inside of the interview itself, she would give me insights as to what she was thinking, how she constructed that interview like a court case.”
The “Jane Eyre” star said that when they met, she also took note of details like how, “She was constantly eating sweets and drinking coffee, and we’d have a vodka. Or, the way that she interacted with her dog.”
Sheen, meanwhile, approached the role thinking about the Duke of York like a “character” rather than the real person.
“I don’t know the real person. It won’t surprise you to know he didn’t invite me into his house to talk to me,” he quipped.
Sheen added, “But one of the surprising things I found was that for someone who was perceived as having privilege, wealth, power… my character seemed to perceive himself as someone very much on the outside, denied things, restricted, not able to have the things that he felt he deserved.”
“So, that in itself becomes an interesting area to explore,” he said.
Wilson, for her part, has “no idea” what the royal family might think of the show.
But, she added, she wanted to keep “a keen eye on who the real victims are in all this.”
This post was originally posted by NYPost
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