“A Very Royal Scandal” examines the life-changing scandal that had Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, Queen Elizabeth’s second son, gamble in a famous hour-long sitdown on the BBC to tell his side of a sex-trafficking controversy involving Jeffrey Epstein, the notorious convicted and dead-by-suicide sexual predator.
A complete and utter disaster, the interview saw the Royal stripped of honorary military titles and patronages by the Queen, and stepping down as a working member of the family. Immediately.
His reputation and position destroyed, the Prince faced subsequent legal charges from the woman who accused him of sexual assault and Epstein of trafficking her as a minor. A court case was averted with a reported $16.3 million settlement.
All that and more is in the fallout of the televised 2019 duel between Michael Sheen’s Andrew and BBC interviewer Emily Maitlis (Ruth Wilson).
Sheen began “Scandal” with a deep dive into Andrew. “It’s a complicated story in all kinds of ways, a series of events surrounding someone that people feel that they’re very familiar with and kind of know and have strong feelings and opinions about,” Sheen, 55, said in a Zoom interview.
“To be able to portray that, in a way that allows an audience to potentially understand things in a different way, or see it from a slightly different point of view, not to necessarily get people to feel that what has happened or not is justified or excused or anything like that, but just to be surprising.”
Sheen knows the parameters of playing real people — he’s done British Prime Minister Tony Blair (three times!) and TV icon David Frost.
That means, “Staying true (as much as you can) to real events and your responsibility towards portraying a real person. To lift the veil somehow and allow people to feel like you’re revealing something behind the scenes.
“That’s always a very satisfying experience for an audience. But to portray this man? It’s simply a hall of mirrors.”
That’s because with Prince Andrew, “So much is behind closed doors. So much is hidden away. And what is ‘public’ is so controlled and stage managed a lot of the time.
“Then you hear gossip, hearsay, and it’s quite difficult to sift between fact and fiction. Particularly, obviously, in the events that we are portraying in this story where there’s a mystery at the heart of this.
“There’s a mystery at the heart this character for me to play,” he added. “I don’t know what he did or didn’t do beyond a certain point. Yet I have to play it.
“I had to make choices to know what’s going on underneath. Is he lying? Hiding things? All that kind of stuff.
“Obviously, ambiguity and mystery is a big part of it.”
“A Very Royal Scandal” streams all 3 episodes on Prime Video Sept. 19