Rufus Sewell is one of our finest living actors, in his time playing roles as heady as Macbeth, King Charles II, and a pre-Hamilton Alexander Hamilton. But news this week suggests Sewell has just signed up for his most difficult transformation yet, a part that will require him to completely disable the involuntary human impulse to sweat. That’s right, he’s about to become Prince Andrew.
Netflix has bought the screen rights to Sam McAlister’s book, Scoops: Behind the Scenes of the BBC’s Most Shocking Interviews from Prince Andrew to Steven Seagal, which tells the story of how she helped to arrange the still fairly mind-boggling 2019 Prince Andrew Newsnight interview.
You will remember this interview: It is the one where Prince Andrew attempted to improve his standing in the face of the grubby allegations made against him by Virginia Giuffre. (The ones he and Giuffre later settled out of court.) And it is also the interview that went so disastrously wrong, with the prince making such an insane amount of bizarrely cocky claims (He can’t sweat! He has a photographic memory when it comes to small-town pizza chains! If anything, he’s too honorable!) that his own mother promptly fired him from the royal family.
Billed as the story of “how three tenacious women got the interview to screen, navigating the political establishment at the BBC and Buckingham Palace to make it happen,” Scoop will star Gillian Anderson as Emily Maitlis, the journalist who coolly nudged Prince Andrew toward the point of self-destruction. Billie Piper will play McAlister and Keeley Hawes will portray Amanda Thirsk, the private secretary doltish enough to think that putting the royal in front of people was actually a good idea.
He can’t sweat! He has a photographic memory when it comes to small-town pizza chains! If anything, he’s too honorable!
The fact that Netflix is making Scoop appears to be a sign of the streamer attempting to both have its cake and eat it. After all, Peter Morgan has stated that the next season of The Crown will be the last, a decision that brutally deprives us of some of the royal family’s wonkiest-ever moments. No Megxit. No Prince Philip plowing his Land Rover into the side of a bewildered civilian’s Kia. No necklace-tearing fights between Princes William and Harry. No scenes, as described in Spare, of Prince Harry off his brains on mushrooms and having a discussion with a newly sentient trash can. And, crucially, none of the Prince Andrew nastiness.
So perhaps this is a way of filling in the gaps. If The Crown won’t show us Prince Andrew comprehensively choking on his own misplaced bravado, then Netflix will just find another production to do it instead. And if Scoop is a hit, who knows, we might one day finally get Prince Harry and the Frozen Penis: The Motion Picture.
Stuart Heritage is a Kent, U.K.–based Writer at Large for AIR MAIL and the author of Bedtime Stories for Worried Liberals