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It’s been almost five years since Prince Andrew sat down with BBC‘s Newsnight journalist Emily Maitlis and singlehandedly changed the fate of his entire royal life in one interview. That moment in history may have never happened if not for the dogged efforts of the show’s producer Sam McAlister — and now, Netflix has adapted her tell-all book, Scoops: Behind the Scenes of the BBC’s Most Shocking Interview, into a compelling movie entitled Scoop, starring Rufus Sewell as the disgraced royal, Gillian Anderson as Maitlis, and Billie Piper as McAlister.
The film will have you riveted from start to finish, but it’s the tense back-and-forth situation between Sewell and Anderson that proves how gripping the moment was in real life. The BBC Newsnight team knew that Prince Andrew had just given the most disastrous interview of his career while McAlister exclusively shared with SheKnows how different Maitlis and Andrew looked after they completed the interview. Describing her BBC colleague as “ashen” after nailing the “incredible interview,” McAlister says Prince Andrew looked like “he’d done the best job in the world.” He had no clue that this was the end of his royal life as he knew it.
McAlister explains that the “difference of opinion between what had happened is the reason [Andrew] did the interview” in the first place. She says that “he looked really pleased with himself, and that was a shocking moment to see.” So, where did that lack of perspective come in the first place? Well, McAlister has some pretty spot-on insight into the royal family and what it’s like to live behind palace walls. “Imagine being born with no need for a job,” she says. “You’re a prince, your mum’s a queen, you live in a palace. At the stage that I met him, he’d had 59 years of being told that he was incredible, brilliant, and amazing. You know, we all drink the Kool-Aid on ourselves sometimes.”
She believes that Prince Andrew walked into Buckingham Palace on Nov. 14, 2019, essentially “very overconfident” about his “own capabilities.” He thought he could talk his way out of the Jeffrey Epstein controversy as someone who was “charming” and knew how to “work a room.” In the end, the royal was no match for the BBC Newsnight team, which was primarily driven by Maitlis, McAlister, and editor Esme Wren — the women knew how crucial this interview was.
Prince Andrew was “someone who had been created by that experience of unfettered privilege and unfettered flattery” in his royal life, and as he witnessed firsthand, it “can have dire consequences.” It’s hard for McAlister to even fathom now that the saga started several years before the interview occurred with an email from Prince Andrew’s communications team looking for a “fluff piece” on his charitable work and his Pitch@Palace Global entrepreneurial venture. It took years of persistence to get him to sit-down with the Newsnight team. The end result was something McAlister never anticipated, and when she learned that the Duke of York was stepping down from his royal duties in the fallout from the BBC interview, she was home on the couch, wrapped in a blanket on a chilly day. “It really was a moment where it was hard to process,” she recalls. “My heart stopped.”
The aftermath of Prince Andrew’s interview is still being felt today as the royal family navigates the health crises of King Charles III and Kate Middleton with cries from the public asking for more transparency. McAlister thinks that the palace is less likely to oblige after Prince Andrew’s “moment of openness.” She adds, “This type of interview doesn’t happen, right? You don’t get someone to go on camera and speak bluntly, and obviously, disastrously, as it turned out.” That’s because it’s “very rare” to “get something that isn’t stage-managed” by the palace — and it likely won’t ever happen again.
McAlister often thinks about what could have been if Prince Andrew had approached this Newsnight “opportunity” from a different angle. “He could have given plausible answers that the public thought were good,” she surmises. “It could have been a situation in which he profusely apologized over and over. Perhaps he would have changed the perception of him.” Instead, his entire life will be scrutinized from here on out.
Scoop premieres on Netflix on Friday, April 5.
Before you go, click here to see the 100 best photos of the royal family from the past 20 years.
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