← All Of It with Alison Stewart
All Of It with Alison Stewart
'A Very Royal Scandal' Tells the Story of the Infamous Prince Andrew Interview
00:25:49
A new series dramatizes the infamous 2019 televised interview with Prince Andrew about his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein.
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Alison Stewart
This is all of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. They call it the get in a news business, that interview that everyone wants. In the States, it could be a politician or a famous actor. But in the uk, you can add a member of the royal family to the list and one who has public troubles. That would be a really big one. In 2019, then BBC journalist Emily Maitlis got the get with the UK's Prince Andrew to address his involvement with Jeffrey Epstein. A young woman alleged that Epstein had trafficked her and she had sex with Prince Andrew. The woman then Virginia Roberts, named him in the press and the pressure was on and Prince Andrew to clear his name. So he agreed to an interview with Emily Maitlis. The new series A Very Royal Scandal follows Maitlis team as they prepare for the interview. And it also shows some of the royal politicking behind the scenes as the Crown tried to insulate the royal family from the scandal. Let's listen to a little bit of the trailer.
- [01:57]
Ruth Wilson
EMILY maitlis, BBC I've been warned about you.
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Emily Maitlis
You have a bit of a reputation.
- [02:04]
Ruth Wilson
Well, for you, I'll try and behave.
- [02:09]
Emily Maitlis
I'm sure you will. We're sure this is right.
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Woman journalist the optics say she has to be female.
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Ruth Wilson
What's my strategy?
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Emily Maitlis
It's two targets. Why did he stay at a convicted paedophile's house? And did he have sex with Giuffre when she was under?
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Well, she's cocky.
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Alison Stewart
You can handle her.
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Emily Maitlis
You treat him like any other man facing allegations of sexual assault.
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People forget I've been to war. I'm going to blow this out the water.
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Ruth Wilson
Do you regret any of your behavior or your friendship with Epstein.
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Emily Maitlis
Now? Still not.
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The Queen is in shock.
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Ruth Wilson
The bottom line is to ensure that this scandal never touches the Crown. Now tell us, Emily, how Does it feel to take down a member of the monarchy? I was only ever hoping to ask the right questions.
- [03:18]
Emily Maitlis
I was trying not to sound guilty.
- [03:21]
Alison Stewart
A Very Royal Scandal comes out this Thursday on Amazon Prime Video. And joining me now to talk about it, please welcome former BB Newsnight journalist Emily Maitlis, who is an executive producer on the series. Nice to meet you, Emily.
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Emily Maitlis
You too, Alison. Thanks.
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Alison Stewart
And also joining us is Ruth Wilson, who plays Emily. Hi, Ruth.
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Ruth Wilson
Hi. Hello.
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Alison Stewart
What questions did you have from Emily from the very beginning?
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Ruth Wilson
What question did I ask her? What's in your handbag? Another question. Do you think he's guilty?
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Alison Stewart
Yes. Well, first of all, why did you want to know what was in her handbag?
- [03:53]
Ruth Wilson
It's a really good insight into someone and it's a personal insight into someone. I think what's really interesting about playing this particular character was that we. We see a very public version on the screen, Emily as a Newsnight reader, but we get to go behind the scenes, get to see her at home. So I wanted to know what she was like, what's inside her handbag, what she has inside it. And she has. What do you have? You have eye patches, not eye patches.
- [04:17]
Emily Maitlis
I have to say, it was a shock when I showed Ruth what my handbag looked like. She not only got to see the inside of my handbag, she carried around the handbag for the duration of the filming. And she realized that all the kind of calm, smooth, sort of swan like behavior that you occasionally get on screen completely evaporates in my real life. And she saw a handbag that was covered in, like, makeup and pen and ink, looks like somebody's graffitied on it. There are wine gums stuck to the bottom. There are broken bits of eyeliner. There are kind of pills and, you know, aspirin that have kind of popped out their blisters. And so at the end of that little demonstration, I think Ruth was probably thinking, this is a psychological head case I've got.
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Alison Stewart
But you were trying to get the off screen Emily as well as the on screen. Yeah.
- [05:01]
Ruth Wilson
And what I loved about it was that, you know, Emily's a serious news journalist. We see her in that vein and in that role. But then meeting her, you know, she's a vivid, full of life, charismatic, fun woman to be around. And I wanted to put those two and showcase those two sides of her and the chaos and the sort of right on the line energy it takes to be a news journalist, and then what the effects that has at home or what it's like in your own Space. So I loved Discovery, and Emily was incredibly generous with her time and her information and herself.
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Emily Maitlis
In my handbag.
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Alison Stewart
And in your handbag, there was another film done about the interview from a different point of view. Emily, what made you decide that this was the project that you agreed to work on?
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Emily Maitlis
What I love about the drama that we've created, and Ruth has done an absolutely extraordinary job of sort of taking it on, is that the interview itself sits almost to the minute in the middle of the three parts. And we not only show the buildup and the work that goes into sort of trying to get this sit down interview with the Duke of York, but we also show the fallout. And in a way, that is the most dramatic episode of all, because you understand the ramifications from that moment onwards. And the fact that five years later on, we are still seeing the reshaping, the realignment and maybe the kind of refiguring of the relationship between the monarchy and the British public now made me realize that there was a whole story to tell, not just of the moment of the interview, which, you know, has now been watched by 10 million people. And I think the drama will send more people to go and have a look at it, rewatch it. But that was one hour, one day, one week, and five years on, we're still kind of learning about the way the monarchy has kind of redefined itself and reshaped itself. So I guess it felt important for me to put it in that context and blueprint. The production company that we work with has a way of picking what they call pivotal moments in British history. They did a very English scandal with Hugh Grant, and they did a very British scandal with Claire Foy. And for them to come to me and say, we think this is a pivotal moment in British history was, you know, kind of pinch yourself moment. Right. Because from that moment on, we started asking a whole new set of questions, actually about the monarchy itself and its relationship with the British public.
- [07:27]
Alison Stewart
It's also a film about you, a woman who swears in front of her kids, God forbid, and yells at the dog and carries on when you. How did you balance those in your head between being the news person, the news presenter, and a person whose sometimes life is falling apart.
- [07:46]
Emily Maitlis
Yeah, I mean, you know, my kids are now old enough to kind of get it and find it funny. And one of the things I used to love was I'd come back from Newsnight, which is a full on late night show. You know, we're lucky if we get home before 1 in the morning. And my oldest Son, who's actually with us today, will be kind of waiting up for me. And he'd be like, do you need a vodka? Was it that kind of show? And I'd be like, I think I do. I think I just need to kind of talk this one through because it is, you know, it's intense. And you are doing an hour of non stop, kind of, you know, seat of your pants interviews. And we've had a kind of crazy decade of news as, as you have in, in the uk. And so it was really important for me to kind of try and give to the drama a sense of everything else that was going on at the time. You know, it was. It was the sort of. It was the fragility, almost the brittleness of politics at the same time. You know, we'd just been through the Brexit vote two or three years earlier, and we were watching the kind of, you know, the shape of our parliament, the shape of our government, really, really kind of frenzied and tense and into this whole political context suddenly walks Da Da, the Queen's favorite son. And it was, it was so out of character for Newsnight to be doing an interview with a member of the royal family. That's not what we do. You know, we do politics, we do hard news, we do current affairs. And one of the things I had to get my head around, I remember was sort of saying to my editor, oh, do I say, is it your Royal Highness? Is it your. Is it sir? Is it your. Do I curtsy at the big. Do I curtsy first? And she just looked at me and she was like, this is not a royal interview. It is an interview about sex trafficking with a member of the Royal family. So I had to kind of rethink the whole interview. But, yeah, I mean, the kind of home life stuff was, I think, an important element. And at the beginning, it was difficult for me because I didn't want to throw my kids and my husband and, you know, sort of. I didn't want to expose more people than me, right, Because I make the choice about me. It's quite hard for the rest of your family members. So we made the kids a bit younger in the series, which I think work well, because hopefully they won't cringe quite as badly. Let's see.
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Alison Stewart
Ruth, do you remember watching this interview with Katie? Where were you, who you were with?
- [10:07]
Ruth Wilson
I was with some friends. It was 2019, and I remember being utterly gobsmacked by it. It was the best piece of drama I've seen on tv. And I was held by it. I couldn't look away. I mean, it was terrifying and sort of uncomfortable to watch. And it was a master class in interviewing. And I've since watched it hundreds of times. And it's extraordinary. It's extraordinary. My big question is, why on earth did he put himself in that scenario? I mean, obviously he wanted to get his narrative out there, his story out there. But the way in which Emily constructed that interview and the strategy behind it and how you kept the tension, you made him feel safe enough to reveal himself, but then you also never dropped the ball. It was an extraordinary piece watching that. And there was something, a focus around that. That's what I wanted to sort of also explore was that intense focus of performance, which is similar to being on stage next to the kind of chaos of everyday journalistic life. And my naivety was that, you know, a news reader would just be reading the news up a teleprompter. But how much I realized the journalists are so much involved in making the news or listening to news every day, you're kind of absorbing it all the time and then working out how to sort of communicate that to an audience. I thought, wow, you live on that high wire the whole time. And then when it really matters, your focus, the like, it's extraordinary. So I loved that to sort of perform around and explore. But what I loved about this drama more than anything as well was the questions it brought up. It doesn't just repeat that interview for us to watch again. It's sort of asking questions about our relationship to the monarchy, about the relationship between the press and the monarchy, about how news and the royals have become entertainment in some ways. And the consequences of those things is journalism. Yes, it has the power to put things on platforms and get stories out there, but it does have limitations too. And of course about privilege and the responsibilities of privilege and power.
- [12:12]
Alison Stewart
My guests are Emily Maitlis, she's executive producer of A Very Royal Scandal. And Ruth Wilson, who is starring as Emily Maitland in the series. You know, in the series we follow you around the newsroom before this even happens and you get reprimanded for rolling your eyes at a politician. I think it was racism is what the original was. How did you understand the concept of non biased journalism and also how the BBC understood it?
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Emily Maitlis
Oh, I think, look, I think in your daily job as a journalist, you're always going to get your knuckles wrapped for things. And that's part of the course, right, that you know, you live, as Ruth said, you live on this high Wire, you tend to, you're out in the field, you know, there is what they call a live defense. So when I roll my eyes, that was an idiotic thing to do, but it was something that I didn't even think was caught on camera. And actually, I think what we were trying, that actually happened in real life. And it was, it involved, funnily enough, a Labor politician who was telling me about, you know, what slogan they would put on their leaflet in the lead up to the 2019 general election, which came actually just. And as soon as it happened, I remember thinking, oh my God, I hope it didn't catch me. You know, I didn't want to have my face caught on camera. But these things happen. And actually what you see there is just, is a kind of sense of, you know, yeah, okay, I got my knuckles wrapped, I'm going to pick up and move on. And this is what I mean, I suppose by the political context at the time, which is we weren't thinking about Prince Andrew actually. Not really. You know, we were thinking about the fact that our own parliament had been proaked. You know, we were going through this real incredible sort of stasis. There was a sense of the toxicity of debate around that time was really intense, I think. And so one of the things that we tried to do was show that this interview grew out of a very, very kind of sort of heated, you know, political moment that took us all by surprise. And I guess more broadly, you know, this is about. It's about what happens when different structures clash. Right, right. The BBC is an institution in the same way that a monarchy is an institution. And the BBC, you know, goes by one set of rules, which is, you know, how the journalists sort of prepare and behave and encounter. And the monarchy goes by a very different set of rules, which is all, you know, a bit slower, a bit more formal. It's 2,000 years of history. And so what I think we do at the beginning is we set up my life in the newsroom. And the kind of adrenaline craziness of that versus this incredibly softly spoken but also deeply controlling environment of the palace. And what we do is bring them together. And it's like that's the big bang. Right.
- [15:09]
Alison Stewart
Prince Andrew's played by Michael Sheehan, who actually, you know, he's been in your role where he's played a dramatic real life encounter of Frost, Nixon. Right. Did you guys talk about that at all, what it's like to play somebody who really exists?
- [15:23]
Ruth Wilson
Yeah, no, I asked him because I've never done A public figure before. So for me, this was a real challenge. And I love the challenge of it, actually, because real people are so much more interesting than anything I can really imagine myself. So, yeah, I asked him and he just sort of said, look, you know, stick the least amount of things on your face and, you know, such a Michael Kwen. And just sort of. It's about getting the essence of someone, really. It's like, you know, you want the audience to sort of believe in the character you've created, because essentially, acting is an interpretive art. So it's. You won't completely replicate someone, and it's best not to. It's best to find your interpretation of that person combined with what Jeremy's script is. I mean, Jeremy's script isn't Emily. It's a script that he's created, a three art character. So you have to lean into the sort of story that you're trying to tell on that, on the page, rather than potentially the reality of it. So for me, it's about finding that interpretation, but bringing enough of the real things that people are familiar with, whether it's your voice or it's the way Emily walks, or it's an energy that you want to kind of transpose onto the screen. I loved it because it gave me boundaries to work within and fantastic boundaries. I mean, Emily's an amazing person. No, I loved it. I loved being a journalist. I loved the world of it. I found it.
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Emily Maitlis
I'm really pinching your arm at this point.
- [16:46]
Alison Stewart
No, it's interesting. It's about being curious.
- [16:50]
Ruth Wilson
Oh, yeah, no, exactly. And actors are curious, you know, so that's where curious beings. So I got to interview Emily Maitlis. It was terrifying and. But I found it going to watch Emily at work at the newsagents, and I just found that really revealing too, just how they all work together, how quick all their brains are, how smart they are.
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Emily Maitlis
Not always.
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Ruth Wilson
Not always. And you're doing multiple things at the same time. Listening to. Watching something on tv, listening to news in your headphones, writing down things. It's like, wow, it's sort of multitasking.
- [17:20]
Emily Maitlis
Ruth understood the stereo brain, which I think all broadcasters have, which is that you can listen to something going out live. Like you can listen to an entire political speech and carry on a conversation with your colleagues and probably do an interview, and you still heard, like, the three top lines, the three headlines of it. And I think the first time you saw that was. Was you showed me that that was novel for other people because we have a Way of just sort of, you know, you can multi. Multi digest information, I suppose, and to.
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Ruth Wilson
Practice at home how to, like, talk and do loads of props, literally, because it was the amount of things. Action I had to do at the same time as having phone calls and conversations. And often, you know, you just get completely lost.
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Emily Maitlis
Okay. That's why my handbag is covered in ink. Right? Because you don't stop what you're doing. You just take a call with your handbag and your pen and your.
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Ruth Wilson
Yeah, I was gonna put my name inside. Mark Ruth was here in your handbag, but didn't get around to it.
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Alison Stewart
Let's see a little bit of the actual interview in this part. Andrew's kind of weird, actually. He's telling one of these stories about how he is. He can refute the Accus claim because he doesn't sweat. Right, let's listen to it. We can talk about it on the other side.
- [18:32]
Emily Maitlis
She was very specific about that night. She described dancing with you and you profusely sweating and that she went on to have baths, possibly.
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There's a slight problem with the sweating because I have a peculiar medical condition which is that I don't sweat or I didn't sweat at the time. And that was. Oh, she. Yes, I didn't sweat at the time because I had suffered what I would describe as an overdose of adrenaline in the Falklands War when I was shot at. And I simply. It was. It was. It was almost impossible for me to sweat.
- [19:16]
Alison Stewart
That's so weird. And it's in the. It's in the film.
- [19:19]
Emily Maitlis
I can't listen to that even now without. Tell me more stomach. It's really hard, isn't it, just to listen to that because. And to put this in context, this was something that Prince Andrew wanted to tell us. He wanted to get this out.
- [19:35]
Alison Stewart
What did he want? What did he think he wanted?
- [19:37]
Emily Maitlis
He thought that this would be a very categorical alibi. And so, you know, sometimes you sort of think, oh, was he oblivious when he was doing that? Was he unaware? I think the opposite is true. He was convinced. He was convinced that if he managed to get across the arguments that he had made in his own head, then everybody that listened to the interview would suddenly understand that he couldn't possibly be guilty of the things of which he was accused. And so he provided the adrenaline excuse explanation to me as a way of saying, you see. And there were other bits, you know, when I talk to him about the nightclub in which Virginia Giuffre, Virginia Roberts, says he danced with her he's like, I don't even know where the bar is. So I couldn't possibly have bought a drink there. And also I wouldn't have worn civilian clothes if I was going out in London. And he sort of says stuff that makes sense in his mind and in his world, right, he's a prince. And if there's one thing that we understand about the monarchy, that of course they live in a kind of the ivory tower of palaces. And so this is what I mean by the clash. You know, if you said that to a normal person, if you said that to a BBC journalist, if you said that to just about anyone, they'd go, what? What the. You know. But in his mind it all made sense and this was his one chance he had of getting across everything that he thought would be persuasive.
- [21:02]
Ruth Wilson
I mean, yeah, Michael said something interesting. Having studied that interview so much and having to recreate the language that is used. I mean, it wasn't written, that's verbatim, that interview that we do on the show. And it's not written obviously by a writer. It's from. It's Andrew's language. And he said, it's so interesting. You see him trying to second guess what Emily knows and thinks. Him try him stopping, almost saying something, then backtracking and talking around it. So he is constantly within the speech himself, constantly sort of second guessing and trying to put the best front or his best version forward of events or what that might put forward. So it's kind of fascinating. He's inside his head constructing and creating and creating a narrative that wants to put out there, but it's very convoluted. It's like a word salad.
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Emily Maitlis
And I guess the thing is that people around him knew he was going to say that. Now if you had an advisor who'd heard you practicing those words in the mirror, you say, stop there. We're not going to say that.
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Ruth Wilson
We're not going to do the interview.
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Emily Maitlis
We're not going to do the interview. You just say, I do not recall or whatever that, you know, your catchphrase is. But I mean, I think this speaks again to that sense of the kind of the shelteredness of the lives in the that palace. Was that when he said that out loud to his closest trusted advisor, she was able to turn to him and say genuinely, that sounds excellent.
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Ruth Wilson
And those interviews, we're saying that really royals don't give interviews like that. They give sort of short little interviews that are very controlled. They don't give one on one hour interviews. Personal interviews. And when they do, it's usually because they're trying to put their narrative, their story forward. They want their voice to be heard, but it's the first time they've done that often. And it always ends in a global news story.
- [22:52]
Alison Stewart
When you were preparing to play Emily, and I don't know if this is true or not, they called back the interview, and then they said, no, it's on. Is that the case? Oh, and so you ran in the show. You run to the palace like a crazy person. I mean, obviously, hair flying going on. Like, she had to check in your phone. Did that actually happen?
- [23:14]
Emily Maitlis
This is the weirdest thing of all that the interview was called off. My team were told that it had been cancelled, and they didn't even tell me because, I mean, they took on so much of that stress and the heat. They didn't tell me it was called off because they still believed that they could get it back on again. And they didn't want my head to be like, oh, my God, is it on? Is it off? You know, what am I doing? And so, I mean, God bless them. They just kept that from me completely. In the drama, we show it where she gets the call from Stuart MacLaine, and then Stuart says that Esme Wren is kind of trying to get it back on again. And so you see it actually playing out. But I only learned from this drama, from that script that that had happened. I mean, it was a kind of freaky thing for me. I was like, he's taking some liberties. I don't think that happened. And they were like, no, no, it did. We just tried to protect you.
- [24:02]
Ruth Wilson
You had a big bag, didn't you, full of other clothes. I brought you a big bag.
- [24:05]
Emily Maitlis
I had this huge kind of gym bag. It was like a Sweaty Betty bag. And I ra the Buckingham palace sort of, you know, courtyard with all this stuff sort of flying all over the place. Cause I'd come with sort of too many. Like, too many bits of outfits, because I didn't know if it was gonna be on, if it was gonna be off, or was it gonna be inside. Was it not? Was it. You know, was I wearing the right stuff? Was I gonna have to change? And so that's how the whole thing opens.
- [24:29]
Alison Stewart
One thing I noticed in watching the movie is that it's a very female forward movie. It's down to his. His daughters, down to Fergie, down to you two, you two, you two. When you did it, did it come forward as a female forward script? Or was that something you realized you looked up and went, wait.
- [24:50]
Ruth Wilson
I think weirdly, I mean, because Emily's involvement in it always felt. And obviously the character Emily is central to it. You have a female perspective. But actually, it was when I was watching it, I thought, oh, wow, the female story's really coming to the fore. And the character of Beatrice becomes almost the heart of the story because it's the fallout that happens for all the women in Prince Andrew's life and the daughters that have to hear that or see it in the papers and hear those stories being told about their father and question whether it's true or not. And so you start to see the impact on all the women in his life. And I didn't really realize that when we. When I read the script and it became really clear. Julian did a brilliant job in directing it, of bringing that to the fore. And of course, then we land as well on Virginia Giuffre, the victims at the heart of this as well.
- [25:42]
Alison Stewart
We've got about a minute, minute and a half left. This. The idea of journalists becoming a story shouldn't happen. That's not supposed to happen. And it did happen to you. You heard it in the trailer. What was that like?
- [25:54]
Emily Maitlis
Yeah, it doesn't feel right. It doesn't feel comfortable. I mean, you know, I love. I mean, I love watching Ruth bring this to life and I love watching what Michael does. I mean, the whole cast is unbelievable. So it is a joy of a drama to watch, just because you get the richness of palace life and you get the kind of clash of the journalist life. But honestly, I'm always kind of like, forget the BBC side. Just concentrate on the palace stuff. Because it's.
- [26:23]
Alison Stewart
It bothers you.
- [26:23]
Emily Maitlis
Yeah, it's still. Yeah, it still makes me feel slightly uncomfortable.
- [26:28]
Alison Stewart
Yeah, don't keep that in mind. Watch the theater, watch the show. Anyway, a very royal scandal drops on September 19th. My guests have been Emily Maitlis and Ruth Wilson.
- [26:36]
Emily Maitlis
Thank.
- [26:37]
Alison Stewart
Thank you for coming to the studio. Thanks so much.
- [26:38]
Emily Maitlis
Thank you so much. Thanks.
- [26:41]
Ira Flato
This is Ira Flato, host of Science Friday. For over 30 years, the science Friday team has been reporting high quality science and technology news, making science fun for curious people by covering everything from the outer reaches of space to the rapidly changing world of AI to the tiniest microbes in our bodies. Audiences trust our show because they know we're driven by a mission to inform and serve listeners first, first and foremost, with important news they won't get anywhere else. And our sponsors benefit from that halo effect. For more information on becoming a sponsor visit sponsorship.wnyc.org.