Emily Maitlis: Prince Andrew and me — the inside story

What’s in your handbag?” Ruth Wilson asks me. It is the first time I have met the award-winning, world-renowned actor. It is such a disarming question my first instinct is to lie. I imagine saying things such as, “Filofax, journal, vitamin D spray, protein bar,” things that will make me sound like a proper grown-up in control of my life. But I catch her piercing blue stare and the words wither on my lips. (Later, I learn, she will wear brown contact lenses when filming to match my eye colour.)
My handbag contains a lot of things that should no longer be there. Nurofen that have escaped their blisters and been crushed beneath the zip. Emergency tissues that have seen better, drier days. Emergency wine gums stuck to emergency tissues. Pens without lids that have graffitied themselves onto the lining. Tampons that have split their wrappers, expanded like airbags, now ready to stop the bloodshed of a Napoleonic battalion. Business cards that should have been transferred to a Rolodex but have now doubled as to-do lists. And inexplicably, a gadget that can smash a window in the event of a car crash to remove a trapped toddler. My toddlers are now 18 and 20. The device has never been used.
I start to explain to Wilson, who is about to play me in a three-part drama, that, sadly, I am not who she thought I was. I am not the gliding, glowering Swan Queen of the TV studio. I am mainly the fast-pedalling duckling. The catastro-fantasist who spends her spare time imagining everything that might go wrong on an intrepid journey to, say, the office, and has tried to prepare for eventualities that do not befall most people.
From this rather inauspicious start, a conversation will grow and a friendship will gently begin to flower, as I discover that I am not alone. Wilson admits she charges around in new clothes without removing their labels and without realising she’s trailing small cardboard tags from her neck. She spills things (I spill things) the whole time. Her hands are often covered in Biro (like my lining). It is an odd way to discover a soulmate. We are not here, primarily, to be friends. We are here so that Wilson can start to understand how to portray me in her latest role, in A Very Royal Scandal, the Prime Video drama of that fateful Newsnight interview with Prince Andrew.
• Emily Maitlis in no hurry to catch Netflix’s Scoop
We have arranged to meet at my podcast The News Agents’ studio in Leicester Square, London, on Wednesday, September 6, which is drilled into my memory because it is my birthday. When she walks in, News Agents HQ is filled with Peppa Pig cake and wine gums and many flavoured and assorted crisps. It looks like a kids’ party. Or, rather, like a heavily indulged presenter with a baked goods rider, which makes me nervous already for Wilson’s portrayal. She arrives at our offices with minimal fuss. No entourage, no agent. She wants to slip into the place as if she worked there. She is make-up free and her hair is scrunched. She is, I quickly learn, an actor with the uncanny ability to appear startlingly beautiful at one moment and physically unremarkable the next. It is a superpower she can weaponise into an ordinariness to blend in.
She meets the News Agents team (my colleague, Jon Sopel, her biggest fan, is devastated to be on holiday this week) and she gingerly sidesteps Peppa Pig and introduces me to her movement coach. They are watching me move. Which means that I instantly forget how to move and become a parody of a fast-moving, fast-talking TV anchor, secretly hoping they confuse me with Charlize Theron in Bombshell.
The movement coach tells me I am “very physical”. An arm-waver, apparently. And then I meet Wilson’s voice coach, who says I have “a northern diphthong”. That is now Wilson’s problem, not mine. I will leave the interpretation of whatever that means to her.
• Emily Maitlis: Did my Prince Andrew interview hurt his daughters?
But it is the conversation I have quietly alone with Wilson, tucked into our studio, which is the moment the whole project comes alive for me. I have invited her here to ask me anything she wants about the interview, the preparation, the wider job of journalism or my innermost thoughts.
As we are sitting together, handbag discussions to one side, she asks me simply, bluntly, if I think Prince Andrew is guilty. The speed of the question stops me. Ever since the interview, nearly five long years ago, it is one I have never articulated. I have had plenty of occasions — and more opportunity than most — to consider Andrew’s “guilt”, but the question has always struck me as imprecise. So I throw it back at Wilson. Guilty of what? And we begin to debate in earnest. I tell her there is no way I or anyone else will ever know the full truth of what happened with or to Virginia Giuffre, the trafficked Jeffrey Epstein victim who claims she was also abused by the royal. But he was clearly guilty of other things — his continued friendship with Epstein after his arrest, his flat-footed response to the victims of sex trafficking.
I remind her that in our interview he described himself as “too honourable” to end his relationship with Epstein without going to stay in his Manhattan townhouse for four days. He called Epstein’s behaviour “unbecoming”, as if he were a smoker rather than a sex offender. This is not proof of Andrew’s own criminal behaviour, I explain, but it does tell us a story of power and unchecked privilege. It tells the story of a man who finds it preposterous these allegations have followed him around for nearly a decade. And perhaps it tells a story of what happens when our royals have no right of reply.
Wilson is trying to understand how the interview came about, whether we knew then the impact it would have on the world and how you prepare for something when the stakes seem to be so huge. And so I re-enter that time — November 2019 — and I pull from it everything I can remember. The germination of the approach, the discussions we had as a team. And I tell her in as much detail as I can recall the events leading up to it.
I describe the moment nearly six months before it happened, in May 2019, when we had been offered Andrew initially, on the promise we would not ask about Epstein. Of how our deputy editor, Stewart Maclean, had, with extraordinary foresight, turned it down precisely because he didn’t like the idea of there being red-line questions that were out of bounds. And how we then watched Andrew slip away to an ITV interview instead.
I relay the story of what happened in those intervening months: the death of Epstein in a New York jail; the cranking up again of our bidding process; the meetings brilliantly set up by our producer, Sam McAlister, with Andrew’s private secretary, Amanda Thirsk, to “audition” for an interview with him; our clandestine trips to Buckingham Palace, welcomed in by jolly security guards and told to “follow the red carpet through the arch”. There is too much, possibly, a garble of recollection and explanation, but Wilson is silent, taking notes, drinking it all in.
And then she wants to know how journalism works. The interrogation, the tone, the fear and the adrenaline of the job. How do you know which questions to ask and which to leave out when you have limited time with your guest? I tell her we always thought of the interview as a document of record. It had to be forensic in its detail. I explain the importance of building-block questions — facts you establish quickly to build upon.
Wilson has played an excellent array of unhinged female characters — psychopaths, murderers, traumatised mothers, as my husband frequently delights in reminding me — but somehow I am now looking at a shadow of my swotty self. Wilson is recording me, scribbling in her notebook, cross-checking, as if she’s an A-level student critiquing Cervantes. I feel old, too responsible, and realise I am doing something that leaves me vaguely uncomfortable. I am peeling back layers to reveal the craft of our trade.
Wilson’s questions are sharp, thoughtful and practical. She wants to know how important the order of the interview is. Whether I stick to the script or go off piste. She wants to understand the team dynamics. What the difference is between editor and producer and director and booker. She wants to feel part of a news crew.
I do what feels most natural and take her back to the busy-ness of our newsroom. She has watched Newsnight go out at Broadcasting House and met many of my former colleagues there. She has seen the cockpit that is the TV gallery, all buttons and levers, lights and panic. Now she sees how we plot an episode of The News Agents from the very beginning. It is a rather quiet day. We watch prime minister’s questions and she observes the way we all continue talking while never missing a line that comes out of the Commons. It is a reminder of the odd superpower most broadcast journalists have — an ability to listen in stereo, to hear instructions from the gallery and wild shouting through an earpiece while maintaining a totally normal-pitched conversation with a studio guest.
None of this, however, is what has surprised Wilson. What has surprised her is the dialogue among the team. It is this she wants to recreate with Jeremy Brock, the scriptwriter. It is the irreverence, the laughter, the piss-taking that begins every day. And how suddenly it turns into a much more insistent desire to not f*** up. We take our jobs both lightly and incredibly seriously. She sees this and reflects it back for me to understand for the first time. I am reminded of a phrase a senior manager at Sky once deployed when he told me, “It’s only telly.” In other words, I had made as bad a mistake as it was possible to make without any loss of life. In this instance I understand what Wilson has just seen — that our jobs mean nothing, in real life, until suddenly they mean everything.
PERHAPS I SHOULD GO BACK TO THE BEGINNING. How the series began, how I became involved in dramatising the interview that has, in some ways, changed my life. I announced my resignation from the BBC in February 2022, two days before Putin invaded Ukraine. It was an odd time geopolitically. And an odd time emotionally.
It was the cutting of a long, muscular umbilical cord that had the potential both to nourish and choke. I felt slightly rootless, but also weightless. I had my own choices to make now. There was no line manager to sign off my extracurricular projects — or to veto them. And I sometimes struggled to work out what was yes and what was no. I had agreed to do a documentary about the Andrew interview with a US film company I admired. I hadn’t thought about fiction up to that point.
That changed when Eugenie Furniss, a literary agent acclaimed for her film deals, proposed a call with Blueprint Pictures, the production company renowned for classy, quietly explosive, award-winning period dramas. It had coined the “scandal” brand with A Very English Scandal, which starred Hugh Grant as the politician Jeremy Thorpe, and followed that with A Very British Scandal, which cast Claire Foy brilliantly as the Duchess of Argyll in the aristocratic scandal of her failed marriage.
That first meeting felt like a homecoming. Producers Peter Czernin and Karen Thrussell asked all the right questions — about guilt, about the royal institution, about public reaction, about my time at the BBC. From that one meeting, things moved quickly and A Very Royal Scandal was born. We chose a writer, Brock, who had scripted one of my all-time favourite films, The Last King of Scotland, and I became an executive producer on one of the strangest pieces of work I have ever been involved in.
In our first conversation, Brock confided he had once worked on a screenplay called The Spare about the second child in a royal succession. It was an extraordinarily prescient plot that unwittingly anticipated Prince Harry’s autobiography. I liked hearing him talk about the psychology of primogeniture positioning. It reassured me we were not going to caricature a guilty villain. We were going to explore the essence of Andrew, the things he had taken for granted his whole life and how they had shaped him and maybe, ultimately, destroyed him.
Brock began his research by asking me — and Newsnight colleagues Esme Wren, Stewart Maclean, Jake Morris and others — hundreds of questions via email. I would sit down and tell him everything I could remember. The minor details about how an outfit was chosen, what I listened to on a morning run, how the kids got to school, and the major details such as who signs off an interview with the royal family.
He asked me how I remembered 2019 and I told him pretty much all of it. The political context of that time, the failed Brexit deal, the exit of Theresa May, the Tory leadership race, the proroguing of parliament under Boris Johnson and the Supreme Court overturning it. I gave him far too much, but I wanted him to see that the Andrew interview in some ways blindsided all of us.
Our focus was on what was happening in parliament and on the streets outside it. In that febrile atmosphere, that scorched white heat of Westminster, it was becoming harder and harder to hold our politicians to account (we were a few short months away from the prime minister hiding in a fridge to avoid reporters on the campaign trail). And I explained that despite everything, Andrew had impressed me with his willingness to come to Newsnight to tell his story. In an age of populism and duplicity, he had maintained a kind of old-fashioned valour that brought him to the wicket, as he might have said. No pads.
I wanted to help Brock tell a story rich in complexity. The clash of a newsroom culture and a royal culture. Questions of what journalism can achieve, but also of its limitations. I wanted us to talk about the women who were such a big part of this story — Epstein’s victims, and whether Andrew had even been aware of them, but also the women closer to home, his daughters, his adviser, Thirsk, and my responsibility to them too. I wanted the drama to reflect something that we had all felt — the sense of unfinished business. A story that had not, in truth, yet given us its ending.
• Emily Maitlis: ‘Prince Andrew told everyone he was happy’
In that process, something shifted in me. I had started out trying to impress upon Brock all the “facts”. True details, quotes, real life. And then I let go, suddenly realising that this was his story, not mine. That the Newsnight interview itself was real and accessible. It is there for anyone to watch. This was something different. A drama in three acts. I had to back off. And so I did. I trusted Brock when he took the audience into the beating heart of the palace and to my family breakfast table. I freed him to create conversations between me and my sons. I watched him forge real moments of pathos between Andrew and his family. And I understood then what a smart, poignant thing he had created.
By November last year, we were ready to start filming. My house was full of costume designers trying to copy my wardrobe and a set designer, Noam Piper, gently asking if I would have a menorah or a Christmas tree at Christmas. (Both.) We dug out the jacket I had worn for the interview and I handed it over. The show’s costume designer, Natalie Ward, took jackets, handbags and coats, either to copy or borrow, and Wilson would then follow up with me via text: “Just checking, you’d never wear a dressing gown at breakfast, right?” (She’s right. Never.)
Up to that point I had had no interaction with Michael Sheen, who was playing Andrew, but now I got to see him up close, at work, turning himself into a person about whom the whole world already had an opinion. I would be on set as the cameras were rolling. “I don’t impersonate,” he said. “I don’t even look like the characters that much, but, by the end of the drama, people tell me they’ve forgotten what the real one looks like.”
I can already see it. He has gained weight for the role. His regal paunch somehow affects not just his gait but the whole turn of his head. More comes from the jowls. The neck. We meet at Horace Walpole’s house in Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, now decked out to look like Royal Lodge, Andrew’s home in Windsor.
They are filming a scene from the last act. Andrew’s lawyers are explaining to him, euphemistically at first, then bluntly, that he may get extradited to the US. I watch the realisation land on Andrew/Michael’s face maybe 15 times as they shoot it from different angles and with different emphasis. It is utterly mesmerising. I could watch it 15 times more. Between scenes, as they’re dressing the set, Sheen wanders over to find me. He has questions about the interview. Or the meaning behind a glance I have now forgotten. Or just a joke to tell me. My head cannot compute the ease with which he slips in and out of character when I have been so paralysed seconds earlier by his portrayal.
I also watch Joanna Scanlan, aka the hapless Terri Coverley in The Thick of It, become Thirsk before my eyes. She wants to know what their relationship was like, duke and confidante. “She looks at him,” I hear myself saying, “the way Terri looks at Peter Mannion MP.” She nods sagely and heads off to let that settle on her character’s soul.
Wilson has banned me from the set. She sweetly tries to explain that it’s not me. It is me. She can’t risk trying to be me and seeing me out of the corner of her eye. It’s all a bit Back to the Future, where Marty meets his parents. We will do dinner instead. When the filming is finished and the promos are shot. We will bring handbags filled with many useless things. And spill drinks. And wear our cardboard labels with abandon.A Very Royal Scandal is available to stream on Prime Video from September 19