Michael Sheen and Ruth Wilson retell the disgraceful downfall of Prince Andrew in A Very Royal Scandal. The new series offers fresh perspective that’s too tantalising to pass up, says Eliza Janssen.
A Very Royal Scandal
Back in 2018, A Very English Scandal covered the 1965 downfall of Liberal parliamentarian Jeremy Thorpe; the 1963 Argyll divorce was next, with A Very British Scandal raising the stakes to aristocratic heights. There’s nowhere for the “A Very…Scandal” series to go, then, but forwards and upwards, setting its latest anthology chapter closer to the present day, and with the highest authority in the land in its sights: the Crown.
Across three provocative, funny, and finely-characterised episodes, A Very Royal Scandal recaptures the grand old Duke of York’s jaw-dropping fall from grace—a string of fibs, faux pas, and (alleged) sickening crimes that has taken place recently enough to still linger in viewers’ minds. You could simply rewatch that disastrous BBC interview between reporter Emily Maitlis and Prince Andrew, sure… but the series offers fresh perspective that’s too tantalising to pass up, embellished as it may be.
What writer Jeremy Brock delivers here is a heightened account of both parties’ complicity—in Jeffrey Epstein’s reprehensible sex trafficking, but also in the public’s hungry, gleeful consumption of such wrongdoing. Through the limited series’ acerbic lens, Maitlis (Ruth Wilson) and Randy Andy (Michael Sheen) have more in common than either might expect, or ever admit.
Neatly divided into three hour-long acts, A Very Royal Scandal captures the brewing controversy before the interview; the atomic cringe of the TV takedown itself; and an aftermath that leaves both reporter and her ruined subject reeling. Wilson makes the most of the amusing contrast between Maitlis’s contralto-voiced steeliness and hectic personal life: a passionate news anchor who isn’t always in control of her conduct, attracting some complaints at the Beeb for rolling her eyes onscreen. Meanwhile, Sheen is eerily spot-on as Andrew, playing the daffy Duke as a man blessed and cursed to exist in another world to the rest of us plebs. “Oh for God’s sake”, he whinges at one handler in a 2011 flashback: “how am I meant to remember that? People take their photograph of me all the bloody time.”
The photograph, of course, reveals the Prince wrapped around a teenage victim of the late American sex offender Epstein. Her name’s Virginia Giuffre, and as this miniseries’ timeline approaches BBC Newsnight’s groundbreaking 2019 interview, her claims mean Andrew can’t play dumb for long. We know that once Emily has him under her microscope, he’ll stutter out shockingly insensitive understatements, such as his clunker that Epstein’s barbarism was merely “unbecoming”. In episode two, we can viscerally feel panic and revelation flooding the Palace’s rooms like poison gas during this now-iconic dialogue: Emily and her peers realising they’ve struck gold, the Queen’s best PR bulldogs realising Andrew is done.
The series is obsessed with presentation and facade, both Wilson and Sheen expertly allowing their initial masks to drop when the time comes. Does Sheen’s Andrew want to protect his daughters, or just use the princesses as props to signify his own questioned humanity? The show doesn’t offer an easy answer. It does, perhaps controversially, allow the disgraced Duke some private moments of guilt: for every scene of Sheen playing a pompous laughing stock shouting about his “mummy”, there are glimpses of the nightclub encounters that Andrew claims to not remember, his expression going slack as he’s haunted by Giuffre and Epstein’s faces.
It would be hard to complain, though, that A Very Royal Scandal lets Andrew off the hook too much. He’s first and foremost depicted to be a privileged oaf, his delusion bolstered by doomed press agent Amanda Thirsk (Joanna Scanlan). This woman has been done so dirty by the limited series, her faith in the Prince’s innocence so exaggerated as to feel like a humiliating schoolgirl crush. After the reputation-destroying chaos of the Newsnight interview, her cheery, unironic summation is the ultimate yes-man catchcry: “I thought that went well!”
The series’ third episode takes a more sombre tone, perhaps losing some of the scandalous momentum of the opening two chapters. We watch as Emily second-guesses her journalism, worrying that the destructive interview has brought only shallow schadenfreude to a situation with real, wronged victims—not just Giuffre, but also Andrew’s uninvolved loved ones, namely his embarrassed daughters. Still, there are always saucy, thought-provoking little moments to savour, such as the ousted Prince wearing his army uniform to watch his mum’s Jubilee… remotely, via TV.
It’s a shame that Sheen and Wilson are only able to play directly opposite one another in a few scenes, since the ones we get are so juicy and tense. And the characters are now, Brock suggests, forever tied together: on rainy English days, we see that they both have to take their dogs outside to pee (the great equaliser!). Wilson’s Emily is smarter, with a more canny and worldly team around her, where Sheen’s Andrew is an overgrown, bellowing baby, never required to develop a survival instinct. It’s almost enough to make you feel bad for the guy. Almost.
