| Nuke World Order |
ROYALLY SCREWED
SCOOP Philip Martin brings one of TV’s most spectacular car crashes back to our screens.
Some television moments are forever etched into the public consciousness. The moon landing. The JFK assassination. Moonlight’s Best Picture win. And, of course, Prince Andrew using Woking’s Pizza Express as an alibi.
Prince Andrew’s car-crash interview with Emily Maitlis in November 2019 is now the subject of the Netflix film Scoop, based on the former Newsnight editor Sam McAlister’s book. The always phenomenal Billie Piper plays Sam, who acts as our guide.
‘We come into the story through Sam,’ says director Philip Martin. ‘She’s not someone who goes to Buckingham Palace, so her dealings with the palace and Andrew’s team come from the point of view of an outsider.’ This starkly contrasts with Martin’s previous stint directing the first two seasons of The Crown, where ‘you’re inside the castle bubble looking out and trying to figure out how the world works’.
In this case, the ‘bubble’ grossly miscalculated how the Prince’s account of his relationship with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein would appear. Looking back, it’s hard to believe that Andrew famously left the interview thinking it had gone rather well. But as Martin explains, ‘Nobody quite knew what it was. Even though they thought they had something great, the journalists didn’t know quite what until it landed with the public. It’s catalysed by its contact with the outside world and its enormous response.’
‘It’s Rufus Sewell as you’ve never seen him before!’
PHILIP MARTIN
Seasoned journalist Maitlis (here played by Gillian Anderson) conducted a masterclass in interrogation, with Prince Andrew (Rufus Sewell) slowly but surely hanging himself with his own rope. But as Martin explains, ‘It’s not a frontal assault in the same way a Jeremy Paxman interview might be, or that you see in Frost/Nixon or A Few Good Men. It’s much more subtle. That was something we explored. What’s the best way to handle the interview? How do you do it? It’s an interview by stealth.’
The event itself occurs around two thirds of the way into the film. ‘We basically did the interview as the interview,’ explains Martin. ‘We replicated the BBC’s cameras, and Gillian and Rufus did it for real, almost like a play.’ And while Martin is quick to praise the ‘poise and intelligence’ that Anderson brought to the role, he’s equally effusive about Sewell capturing a more controversial figure. ‘Whatever your view on him, Andrew has an energy to him. And I think Rufus, just in his physicality, grasped that very quickly. It’s Rufus Sewell as you’ve never seen him before!’
What we witnessed that day was famously described as being beyond a ‘train wreck’ and ‘a plane crashing into an oil tanker, causing a tsunami, triggering a nuclear explosion level bad’. Now who wouldn’t want to revisit that?
SCOOP STREAMS ON NETFLIX FROM 5 APRIL.