A Very Royal Scandal Series-Premiere Recap: I’ve Been to War

In November 2019, after years of rumors surrounding his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein — and accusations that he had sex with the 17-year-old alleged trafficking victim Virginia Giuffre — rose to new prominence after the disgraced financier’s death, Prince Andrew decided to clear the air. He sat down for a 49-minute interview with journalist Emily Maitlis, the brilliantly combative host of the evening current-affairs program Newsnight, during which he said he did not regret his relationship with Epstein. This among stranger tidbits that quickly became piss-taking memes: that he couldn’t sweat because of an adrenaline malfunction, for one, and more notoriously, that he could not have slept with Giuffre on the date she alleged because he was at a pizza party in the provincial town of Woking. As most will recall — this happened less than five years ago — it did not go well for the queen’s favorite son: He was soon suspended from public duties and later resigned from all of his public roles.

Andrew’s alleged ties to Epstein went back years. Perhaps such is why each episode of A Very Royal Scandal, which recalls the events before, during, and after the interview took place, opens with the sound of ticking, a reputational bomb waiting to blow. It’s the third installment of the loosely connected A Very X Scandal series, which began in 2018 with the Hugh Grant–starring story of Jeremy Thorpe, a member of Parliament accused of having a gay affair with a younger man he then was further accused of conspiring to murder. The allegations the new series deals with are abhorrent, which is easy to forget amid the absurdity of it all, but it’s hard to deny the tabloid appeal of such lewd melodrama — a royal prince accused of sex crimes amid ties to America’s most notorious sexual predator.

Lest we forget that A Very Royal Scandal wasn’t even the first to dramatize this particularly grim moment in recent monarchical memory. Netflix was first to the Andrew affair with an hour-and-40-minute-long film called Scoop, which starred Gillian Anderson as Maitlis in the lead-up to the interview that destroyed Prince Andrew’s familial, professional, and social standing. (He was played by Rufus Sewell. Both transformations were eerily close to their subjects.) Scoop came out in April this year and was met with a lukewarm critical response as another product of streaming-age churn, and few have talked about it since.

Nevertheless, A Very Royal Scandal is here, and the first episode serves to jog our memories of events that occurred so recently and were last turned into light entertainment just five months ago. Whereas in Scoop we saw the buildup to — and consequences of — the Andrew interview largely from the viewpoint of a streetwise TV producer played by Billie Piper, her character is here relegated to the background in favor of Maitlis and Andrew, whose backstories are colored throughout the episode. This time, they are played by Luther and The Affair’s Ruth Wilson and the chameleonic Michael Sheen, who collects public figures to play like Pokémon. (He portrayed the journalist David Frost in Frost/Nixon, the football — ugh, soccer — manager Brian Clough in The Damned United, and Prime Minister Tony Blair in three different movies.)

Much of the reason people will watch this show, I suspect, will be to see how Wilson and Sheen portray their subjects because transformation is half of the sell with these things: With Lincoln, what we really wanted to see was Daniel Day-Lewis become the famously top-hatted president, and if there was any appeal to watch Darkest Hour, it was in the artificial fattening of Gary Oldman, whose makeup and array of prosthetics paid no small part in winning him an Oscar. By the end of The Crown, was there anything more thrilling than the duel of the Dianas? We just love impressions, even if the subjects are a famous newsreader and disgraced royal. So, how transformed are they? This is a subject we’ll return to with the re-creation of the infamous interview to come (spoiler alert, but it was always going to be re-created, and all of these episodes land at once). But, for now, Sheen looks like a portlier white-haired Sheen, though his mannerisms are eerily on-point; Wilson looks nothing like Maitlis, but the voice is very accurate, if cartoonish. I listen to a lot of Maitlis’s podcast, The News Agents, and I think I could tell them apart if I were to listen with my eyes closed, but it’s marginal.

And so the episode begins in the moments just before the famous interview takes place, a frantic affair indeed: Maitlis, late to the sit-down that will shoot her into the stratosphere, heaving bags of spare clothes in case of a last-minute wardrobe malfunction, rushes into Buckingham Palace. Meanwhile, a grandiose, grandstanding Andrew makes his way into the interview room. On his way down one of the palace’s ornate halls, his loyal aide Amanda Thirsk (Joanna Scanlan) in tow, he offers an inquiring servant a brusque “fuck off,” which we will come to know as a defining tic in Sheen’s performance. The mirror image of the two is a subversion of how they will feel under the lights of the interview. Andrew is calm, measured, dominative, combatant, and confident. Maitlis sweats. She heads to the bathroom, not for a nervous wee, but to munch on some chocolate. (In an interview on The News Agents with her co-host Lewis Goodall, Maitlis said that before she and Andrew began, she was mostly nervous about her stomach audibly rumbling.)

There’s a quick flashback to 2011, in which Andrew is told by an aide that tabloid newspaper the Daily Mail is investigating his alleged assault of Giuffre — which he has conveniently forgotten about — and that they have a photograph taken of the pair in “what appears to be” Ghislaine Maxwell’s house. This is a man steeped in inherited privilege, of course — about the most inherited privilege one can legally acquire — and it’s very telling that he simply bats away the accusation as he would a fly buzzing around his cucumber sandwich. Any bets on this photograph coming up later? Don’t be silly. You can’t bet on (fictionalized retellings of) historical events!

Back to the present — 2019, to be clear — and Maitlis is listening to a radio report about Theresa May’s doomed Brexit deal while her husband gets the kids ready for school. Later, in a pitching session at the BBC, the question of an interview with Andrew comes up; Maitlis argues in favor of it, but only if Epstein is on the table. We get to know Maitlis as a hard-hitting news obsessive who, like much of the British public by the end of the 2010s, is tired of the monotony of Brexit and is unafraid of holding her guests to account on Newsnight, even if a harmless eye roll lands her in hot water. “I got a bit stroppy,” she tells her doting husband of the irritated blunder when she comes home at God knows what time, fixing herself an ice-cold glass of vodka. The show does not shy away from drawing parallels between Maitlis and Andrew, and this fiery sense of public scrutiny is something they have both felt.

Another prominent parallel occurs in the depiction of their domestic lives, as we also spend some time with Andrew’s immediate (and more famous) family: his children Princess Beatrice (Honor Swinton Byrne) and Princess Eugenie (Sofia Oxenham) and his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson (Claire Rushbrook). We meet the kids at an event for Andrew’s pet project, Pitch @ Palace, which he set up as a network for budding youth entrepreneurs in the U.K. The effect is to humanize Andrew, and it’s notable in the first episode that Sheen’s performance does not betray a sense of whether the actor thinks his subject is guilty; perhaps it would be easy to portray him as an odious ogre, but in these scenes, he’s just an embarrassing dad (who happens to be the son of the then-sitting monarch, but y’know). Later on, as Maitlis researches Andrew’s financial ties to Epstein, a flashback to December 2010 depicts Andrew meeting Epstein — yeah, a guy plays Epstein, ugh — in his New York mansion to ask him for money to help Ferguson with a debt, before they are photographed taking a stroll in the park. By this point, as Andrew mentions, Epstein had already been convicted of child prostitution in Florida.

In the present, again, Epstein is found dead, as Andrew is informed over the phone by Thirsk. “Is this good for me or bad,” he asks in another line telling of his self-interest. Later, it gets much worse, as an investigation for the Channel 4 documentary series Dispatches — the episode was in real-life titled “The Prince and the Paedophile” — lays bare the ties between Andrew and his now dead friend. With the escalating demand for a PR antidote, Thirsk suggests that they reconsider the idea of the Newsnight interview with no red tape around the Epstein question. Oh, the bitter irony: His publicist, who rightly thinks it’s a terrible idea to put the naïve prince in front of a famously scathing journalist for an hour, gets the sack for having the temerity to point any of this out, and so the wheels turn toward the interview of a lifetime. Maitlis and her team meet with Thirsk and Andrew, who brings along Beatrice — his daughter, but perhaps more important for optics in the room, another woman. At the end of the meeting, Andrew asks if any of the BBC team have been victims of abuse. It’s a curious moment: a narcissist’s performed attempt at empathy, perhaps? Not even. He just wants to be sure that Maitlis isn’t overly biased for his accuser.

Soon after Maitlis and the BBC team leave, word comes through that the interview has been approved, which will happen days from now, and they rush off to prepare. (Wilson brilliantly handles an exchange with Maitlis’s editor over which pair of high heels to wear during the interview, deciding on the pair that will most agitate the tabloids: “Fuck the Mail, sexy heels it is!”) But the episode ends on a cliffhanger — well, it would be if we didn’t already know that the interview ultimately went ahead — with the reveal that the BBC investigative series Panorama has an upcoming episode in which Giuffre recalls her encounter with Andrew. (“She says he sweats like a pig” being one quoted line that nicely foreshadows Andrew’s much-meme’d claim to come that he can’t sweat at all.) It won’t air until after the interview, but if it’s leaked, the interview will surely be off.

In the meantime, Andrew heads for an evening horse ride with Beatrice. “People forget, I’ve been to war,” he boasts. “I promise you — I’m going to blow this out of the water.”