When Rufus Sewell was first announced to play Prince Andrew in Netflix’s Scoop, the British actor “was delighted” to see complaints saying he was terribly cast. “Oh hell no,” said one X user, while others pointed out that the handsome Olivier- and Tony-nominated actor looked nothing like Queen Elizabeth’s disgraced son. One social media seer simply forecasted, “That is not going to work.”
Grinning on a Zoom from London, the actor tells me, “That’s the best thing someone like me can hear. I can either fuck up and it’ll be like, ‘Yeah, as expected,’ or it’ll be a pleasant surprise. That did take the pressure off.”
With the bar set self-assuringly low, Sewell began preparing for the drama. It’s based on former Newsnight producer Sam McAlister’s book Scoops, which details the making of Andrew’s disastrous 2019 interview with Emily Maitlis (Gillian Anderson). Afterward, the sit-down was dubbed “one of the single worst PR moves in recent history.” The film, streaming Friday and directed by Philip Martin (The Crown, Catherine the Great) chronicles how McAlister (Billie Piper) secured the historic interview and how Maitlis prepared for the conversation, as well as the dialogue with Prince Andrew itself.
The interview, which Prince Andrew hoped would tamp down the scandal around his friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, only ballooned the controversy and made Andrew a laughingstock. (“I don’t think anyone envisaged that the answers would be as bad as they were,” the real McAlister said.) The royal denied accuser Virginia Giuffre’s claim he had sex with her when she was a teenager, then claimed that he could not sweat because of an adrenaline overdose in the Falklands War.
Though Sewell felt it important to watch flattering footage of Prince Andrew too, the actor viewed the cringeworthy Newsnight interview obsessively—counting the milliseconds of each pause, matching verbal slips, and memorizing all of those ridiculous lines Andrew gave. (On his decision to stay at Epstein’s home: “I admit fully that my judgment was probably colored by my tendency to be too honorable, but that’s just the way it is.”) They’re the kind of lines that, “depending how you view them, are either exasperating or painful to watch. Or sometimes, in a dreadful way, kind of funny,” the actor says.
Sewell also watched versions of the Newsnight interview he found on YouTube where FBI and CIA body-language experts analyze the royal’s mannerisms. They noted how Andrew’s legs were crossed, how he used his hands to self-soothe, and how his heartbeat could be read. They also pointed out “when he was telling the truth, which was surprisingly often,” says Sewell. “That’s not to say, as a general statement, he was telling the truth. People will employ the truth for various reasons—and sometimes it’s to mislead.”
Though Sewell has no interest in sharing his views on the royal’s culpability—Prince Andrew settled out of court with Giuffre for a reported $16 million while denying the allegations—he had takeaways after rewatching the Newsnight interview so obsessively, sometimes with FBI experts. “There’s plainly things that he’s done,” opines Sewell. “He’s afraid of the repercussions of mentioning other names. I think there’s a very strong sense that he doesn’t know how much more [information] is out there or who has the key to it. I think you can tell [in] his extreme hesitancy to make clearer statements about other people…. There’s a deep sense of fear in there as well.”
“It’s very interesting what people’s relationship to their own narrative [is], being perpetrators or victims. Is life being done to them, or are they making it happen?” continues Sewell. “I’ve got a strong feeling of someone who felt a compassion and certain sensitivity for himself…an inability to see other people, especially the further they get from the crown, as fully whole humans. He’s very much a product of his surroundings and his upbringing…and he feels that in order for his truth to be known, he might need to fudge around some unhelpful [details].”
Courtesy of Netflix.
Before transforming his face with three to four hours’ worth of makeup, Sewell pinpointed Andrew’s behavioral peculiarities. “There’s a kind of half—in England you would say—‘blokey’ aspect to him,” Sewell says. “If you listen to him, he’s not noticeably posh in a sharp way like his brother is. He attempts to have a kind of parity with a common man—a kind of laddishness, a looseness. But then there’s the occasional very sharp, very Windsor sound that unites him with his family.” When memorizing the script, he says, “It was like a mathematical process to work out which combination of sounds ended up being woolly in the right way.”
With the Newsnight interview, at least, Sewell was able to match his speech to Andrew’s. “I would watch the interview, try to copy it, and then I’d film myself sometimes,” he says. “What I saw was so far from what I needed, but part of the process is not worrying. You have to go through being bad without judging yourself, and you have to become comfortable in that discomfort until something starts to take shape.”
Most of Scoop is concerned with Prince Andrew’s catastrophic interview, but there are also a few clues about the royal’s personal life. One shot shows the prince’s bed and his reported teddy bear collection, comprising 72 plush animals that he is said to have his maids put into a specified order each day. Asked about that strange character detail, Sewell shares his own armchair psychological read: “As far as I’m concerned, it’s something about keeping sacred a lost part of himself. There was a period when he was the adored child—the scamp who was spoiled. The favorite of not only the queen, but Philip, and all of them. He was that naughty, incorrigible one who would steal the cookies and blah, blah, blah. And then he got torn away from his mummy and sent to school—not to suggest that he had it any worse than his brother. He didn’t. But it’s all down to the individual. You never know what is a primal wound in someone.”
Given how much of a stretch the role of Prince Andrew seemed, Sewell said he was “very pleased” the offer came his way. “I was flattered, because it’s nice to get offered something that makes you feel like you’re an actor rather than getting sent similar things because people assume you’re a type,” says the actor. Sewell himself knows what it is to be typecast; he’s had phases of being seen as “a brooding bloke on a horse, and then a baddie, and then a king” during his three-decade career.
Sewell points out that all his roles are difficult in their own ways. Playing the smooth Hal Wyler on The Diplomat isn’t any easier or harder to play than the bumbling Andrew: “They’re just very different. Like going from math to English.” (Asked about the second season of The Diplomat, Sewell would only tease, “I’m not at liberty to say.”)
Sewell says that being disguised as a character in Scoop took him back to his drama-school days, when he felt more comfortable playing the character-actor roles, like an old man, rather than the leading men. But 30-something years later, he still had to push himself to risk humiliation—even if the social media bar has been set pleasingly low. “I had to take the risk with the idea that it’s not the end of the world if, as an artist, you miss. It’s only in movies that things like that always succeed. The reality of it is there’s a chance that you’ll fail.”
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