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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. They call it the "get" in a news business; that interview that everyone wants. In the states, it could be a politician or a famous actor, but in the UK, you can add a member of the royal family to the list, and one who has public troubles, that would be a really big one. In 2019, then BBC journalist Emily Maitlis got the "get" with the UK's Prince Andrew to address his involvement with Jeffrey Epstein. A young woman alleged that Epstein had trafficked her and she had sex with Prince Andrew. The woman, then Virginia Roberts, named him in the press and the pressure was on Prince Andrew to clear his name, so he agreed to an interview with Emily Maitlis.

The new series, A Very Royal Scandal, follows Maitlis' team as they prepare for the interview, and it also shows some of the royal politicking behind the scenes as the crown tried to insulate the royal family from the scandal. Let's listen to a little bit of the trailer.

Ruth Wilson: Emily Maitlis, BBC.

Prince Andrew: I've been warned about you. You have a bit of a reputation.

Ruth Wilson: Well, for you, I'll try and behave.

Prince Andrew: I'm sure you will. [laughter] We're sure this is right. A woman journalist.

Speaker 1: The optics say she has to be female.

Ruth Wilson: What's my strategy?

Speaker 2: It's two targets. Why did he stay at a convicted pedophile's house, and did he have sex with Giuffre when she was underage?

Prince Andrew: Well, she's cocky.

Speaker 3: You can handle her. You treat him like any other man facing allegations of sexual assault.

Prince Andrew: People forget I've been to war. I'm going to blow this out the water.

Ruth Wilson: Do you regret any of your behavior or your friendship with Epstein?

Prince Andrew: Now? Still not.

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Sir Edward Young: The queen is in shock. The bottom line is to ensure that this scandal never touches the crown.

Presenter: Now, tell us, Emily, how does it feel to take down a member of the monarchy?

Ruth Wilson: I was only ever hoping to ask the right questions.

Prince Andrew: I was trying not to sound guilty.

Alison Stewart: A Very Royal Scandal comes out this Thursday on Amazon Prime Video, and joining me now to talk about it, please welcome former BBC Newsnight journalist, Emily Maitlis, who is an executive producer on the series. Nice to meet you, Emily.

Emily Maitlis: You, too, Alison. Thanks.

Alison Stewart: Also joining us is Ruth Wilson, who plays Emily. Hi, Ruth.

Ruth Wilson: Hi. Hello.

Alison Stewart: What questions did you have from Emily from the very beginning?

Ruth Wilson: What question did I ask her?

Alison Stewart: Yes.

Ruth Wilson: What's in your handbag? [laughs] Another question, do you think he's guilty?

Alison Stewart: First of all, why did you want to know what was in her handbag?

Ruth Wilson: It's a really good insight into someone, and it's a personal insight into someone. I think what's really interesting about playing this particular character was that we see a very public version on the screen, Emily as a Newsnight reader, but we get to go behind the scenes, get to see her at home, so I wanted to know what she was like, what's inside her handbag, what she has inside it, and she has-- What do you have? You have eye patches? Not eye patches. Eye masks.

Emily Maitlis: I have to say, it was a shock when I showed Ruth what my handbag looked like. She not only got to see the inside of my handbag, she carried around the handbag for the duration of the filming, and she realized that all the calm, smooth, swan-like behavior that you occasionally get on screen completely, evaporates in my real life, and she saw a handbag that was covered in makeup and pen and ink. It looks like somebody's graffitied on it. There are wine gums stuck to the bottom. There are broken bits of eyeliner. There are pills and aspirin that have popped out their blisters, and so at the end of that little demonstration, I think Ruth was probably thinking, "This is a psychological head case I've got."

Alison Stewart: You were trying to get the off-screen Emily, as well as the on-screen, yes?

Ruth Wilson: Yes. What I loved about it was that Emily's a serious news journalist, and we see her in that vein and in that role, but then meeting her, she's a vivid, full of life, charismatic, fun woman to be around. I wanted to put those two and showcase those two sides of her and the chaos and the right-on-the-line energy it takes to be a news journalist and then what the effects that has at home or what it's like in your own space. I loved discovering, and Emily was incredibly generous with her time and her information and herself and my handbag.

Emily Maitlis: And my handbag.

Ruth Wilson: And your handbag.

Alison Stewart: There was another film done about the interview from a different point of view. Emily, what made you decide that this was the project that you agreed to work on?

Emily Maitlis: What I love about the drama that we've created, and Ruth has done an absolutely extraordinary job on taking it on, is that the interview itself sits almost to the minute in the middle of the three parts, and we not only show the build-up and the work that goes into trying to get this sit down interview with the Duke of York, but we also show the fallout, and in a way, that is the most dramatic episode of all, because you understand the ramifications from that moment onward.

The fact that five years later on, we are still seeing the reshaping, the realignment, and maybe the refiguring of the relationship between the monarchy and the British public now, made me realize that there was a whole story to tell, not just of the moment of the interview, which has now been watched by 10 million people, and I think the drama will send more people to go and have a look at it, rewatch it. That was one hour, one day, one week, and five years on, we're still learning about the way the monarchy has redefined itself and reshaped itself. I guess it felt important for me to put it in that context.

Blueprint, the production company that we work with has a way of picking what they call pivotal moments in British history. They did a very English scandal with Hugh Grant, and they did a very British scandal with Claire Foy, and for them to come to me and say, "We think this is a pivotal moment in British history," was a pinch-yourself moment. Because from that moment on, we started asking a whole new set of questions, actually, about the monarchy itself and its relationship with the British public.

Alison Stewart: It's also a film about you, a woman who swears in front of her kids-

Emily Maitlis: God forbid.

Alison Stewart: -and yells at the dog and carries on. How did you balance those in your head between being the news person, the news presenter, and a person whose sometimes life is falling apart?

Emily Maitlis: My kids are now old enough to get it and find it funny, and one of the things I used to love was, I'd come back from Newsnight, which is a full-on late-night show. We're lucky if we get home before 1:00 in the morning, and my oldest son, who's actually with us today, will be waiting up for me, and he'd be like, "Do you need a vodka? Was it that kind of show?' I'd be like, "I think I do. I think I just need to talk this one through," because it's intense, and you are doing an hour of nonstop seat-of-your-pants interviews, and we've had a crazy decade of news, as you have, in the UK.

It was really important for me to try and give to the drama a sense of everything else that was going on at the time. It was the fragility, almost, the brittleness of politics at the same time, we'd just been through the Brexit vote two or three years earlier, and we were watching the shape of our parliament, the shape of our government, really, really frenzied and tense, and into this whole political context suddenly walks, da da, the queen's favorite son. It was so out of character for Newsnight to be doing an interview with a member of the royal family. That's not what we do.

We do politics, we do hard news, we do current affairs, and one of the things I had to get my head around, I remember, was saying to my editor, "Oh, do I say, is it your Royal Highness? Is it Sir? Do I curtsy first?" She just looked at me and she was like, "This is not a royal interview. It is an interview about sex trafficking with a member of the royal family." I had to rethink the whole interview, but, yes, the home life stuff was, I think, an important element. At the beginning, it was difficult for me because I didn't want to throw my kids and my husband and I didn't want to expose more people than me because I make the choice about me.

It's quite hard for the rest of your family members. We made the kids a bit younger in the series, which I think worked well, because hopefully, they won't cringe quite as badly. Let's see.

Alison Stewart: Ruth, do you remember watching this interview?

Ruth Wilson: Yes, I do.

Alison Stewart: Where were you, who you were with?

Ruth Wilson: I was with some friends. It was 2019, and I remember being utterly gobsmacked by it. It was the best piece of drama I've seen on TV, and I was held by it. I couldn't look away. It was terrifying and uncomfortable to watch, and it was a masterclass in interviewing. I've since watched it hundreds of times, [laughs] and it's extraordinary. My big question is, why on earth did he put himself in that scenario? Obviously, he wanted to get his narrative out there, his story out there, but the way in which Emily constructed that interview and the strategy behind it and how you kept the tension, you made him feel safe enough to reveal himself, but then you also never dropped the ball.

It was an extraordinary piece watching that, and there was something, a focus around that. That's what I wanted to also explore, was that intense focus of performance, which is similar to being on stage next to the chaos of everyday journalistic life. My naivety was that a news reader would just be reading the news up a teleprompter, but how much I realized the journalists are so much involved in making the news or listening to news every day. You're absorbing it all the time and then working out how to communicate that to an audience.

I thought, "Wow, you live on that high wire the whole time, and then when it really matters, your focus, it's extraordinary." I loved that, to perform around and explore, but what I loved about this drama more than anything as well, was the questions it brought up. It doesn't just repeat that interview for us to watch again. It's asking questions about our relationship to the monarchy, about the relationship between the press and the monarchy, about how news and the royals have become entertainment in some ways, and the consequences of those things is journalism.

Yes, it has the power to put things on platforms and get stories out there, but it does have limitations, too, and, of course, about privilege and the responsibilities of privilege and power.

Alison Stewart: My guests are Emily Maitlas, she's executive producer of A Very Royal Scandal, and Ruth Wilson, who is starring as Emily Maitlis in the series. In the series, we follow you around the newsroom before this even happens and you get reprimanded for rolling your eyes at a politician. I think it was about racism, is what the original was. How did you understand the concept of nonbiased journalism and also how the BBC understood it?

Emily Maitlis: Look, I think in your daily job as a journalist, you're always going to get your knuckles wrapped for things, and that's part of the course. As Ruth said, you live on this high wire. You're out in the field. There is what they call a live defense, so when I roll my eyes, that was an idiotic thing to do, but it was something that I didn't even think was caught on camera, and actually, I think what we were trying-- that actually happened in real life. It involved, funnily enough, a Labour politician who was telling me about what slogan they would put on their leaflet in the lead-up to the 2019 general election, which came, actually just afterwards.

As soon as it happened, I remember thinking, "Oh, my God, I hope it didn't catch me." I didn't want to have my face caught on camera, but these things happen, and actually, what you see there is just a sense of, "Yes, okay, I got my knuckles wrapped. I'm going to pick up and move on." This is what I mean, I suppose, by the political context at the time, which is we weren't thinking about Prince Andrew, actually, not really. We were thinking about the fact that our own parliament had been prorogued. We were going through this real incredible stasis.

There was a sense of the toxicity of debate around that time was really intense, I think, and so one of the things that we tried to do was show that this interview grew out of a very, very heated political moment that took us all by surprise, and I guess, more broadly. It's about what happens when different structures clash, right?

Alison Stewart: Right.

Emily Maitlis: The BBC is an institution in the same way that a monarchy is an institution, and the BBC goes by one set of rules, which is how the journalists prepare and behave and encounter, and the monarchy goes by a very different set of rules, which is all a bit slower, a bit more formal. It's 2000 years of history, and so what I think we do at the beginning is we set up my life in the newsroom and the adrenaline craziness of that versus this incredibly softly spoken but also deeply controlling environment of the palace, and what we do is bring them together, and it's like, "That's the big bang."

Alison Stewart: Prince Andrew's played by Michael Sheen, who actually he's been in your role where he's played a dramatic, real-life encounter of Frost/Nixon. Right?

Ruth Wilson: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Did you guys talk about that at all, what it's like to play somebody who really exists?

Ruth Wilson: Yes. No, I asked him because I've never done a public figure before.

Alison Stewart: Oh, that's interesting.

Ruth Wilson: For me, this was a real challenge, and I love the challenge of it, actually, because real people are so much more interesting than anything I can really imagine myself. [laughs] I asked him, and he just said, "Look, stick the least amount of things on your face."

[laughter]

Emily Maitlis: Such a Michael quote.

Ruth Wilson: It's such a Michael quote.

Alison Stewart: It's so great.

Ruth Wilson: It's about getting the essence of someone, really. It's like you want the audience to believe in the character you've created because essentially, acting is an interpretive art. You won't completely replicate someone, and it's best not to. It's best to find your interpretation of that person combined with what Jeremy's script is. Jeremy's script isn't Emily. It's a script that he's created a three-arc character, so you have to lean into the story that you're trying to tell on the page rather than potentially the reality of it.

For me, it's about finding that interpretation, but bringing enough of the real things that people are familiar with, whether it's your voice or it's the way Emily walks or it's an energy that you want to transpose onto the screen. I loved it because it gave me boundaries to work within and fantastic boundaries. Emily's an amazing person. No, I loved, and I loved being a journalist. I loved the world of it. I found it really exciting.

Emily Maitlis: I'm really pinching your arm at this point. [unintelligible 00:15:54].

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: Oh, it's interesting. It's about being curious.

Ruth Wilson: Oh, yes, exactly. Actors are curious. We're curious beings, so I got to interview Emily Maitlis. It was terrifying, but I found it going to watch Emily at work, at the News Agents, and I just found that really revealing, too. Just how they all work together, how quick all their brains are, how smart they are.

Emily Maitlis: Not always.

Ruth Wilson: Not always, but you're doing multiple things at the same time. Watching something on TV, listening to news and your headphones, writing down things. It's like, "Wow. It's multitask madness."

Emily Maitlis: Ruth understood the stereo brain, which I think all broadcasters have, which is that you can listen to something going out live. You can listen to an entire political speech and carry on a conversation with your colleagues and probably do an interview, and you still heard the three top lines, the three headlines of it, and I think the first time you saw that, you showed me that that was novel for other people because we have a way of-- you can multi digest information, I suppose.

Ruth Wilson: I had to practice at home with an earpiece, how to talk and do loads of props, literally, because it was the amount of things action I had to do at the same time as having phone calls and conversations, and often you just get completely lost.

Emily Maitlis: That's why my handbag is covered in ink because you don't stop what you're doing. You just take a call with your handbag and your pen and your--

Ruth Wilson: I was going to put my name inside. Mark my name, "Ruth was here in your handbag," but didn't get around to it.

Alison Stewart: Let's say a little bit of the actual interview. In this part, Andrew's weird, actually. He's telling one of these stories about how he can refute the accuser's claim because he doesn't sweat. Let's listen to it. We can talk about it on the other side.

Ruth Wilson: She was very specific about that night. She described dancing with you and you profusely sweating, and that she went on to have baths, possibly.

Prince Andrew: There's a slight problem with the sweating because I have a peculiar medical condition, which is that I don't sweat or I didn't sweat at the time, and that was-- Oh, she-- Yes, I didn't sweat at the time because I had suffered what I would describe as an overdose of adrenaline in the Falklands War when I was shot at, and it was almost impossible for me to sweat.

Alison Stewart: That's so weird, and it's in the film.

Emily Maitlis: I can't listen to that even now without stomach clenching.

Alison Steward: Tell me more.

Emily Maitlis: It's really hard, isn't it, just to listen to that? Because, and to put this in context, this was something that Prince Andrew wanted to tell us. He wanted to get this out.

Alison Stewart: What did he want? What did he think he wanted?

Emily Maitlis: He thought that this would be a very categorical alibi, and so sometimes you think, "Oh, was he oblivious when he was doing that? Was he unaware?" I think the opposite is true. He was convinced. He was convinced that if he managed to get across the arguments that he had made in his own head, then everybody that listened to the interview would suddenly understand that he couldn't possibly be guilty of the things of which he was accused, and so he provided the adrenaline excuse explanation to me as a way of saying, "You see?"

There were other bits, when I talked to him about the nightclub in which Virginia Giuffre or Virginia Roberts says he danced with her, he's like, "I don't even know where the bar is, so I couldn't possibly have bought a drink there, and also, I wouldn't have worn civilian clothes if I was going out in London." He says stuff that makes sense in his mind and in his world. He's a prince, and if there's one thing that we understand about the monarchy, of course, they live in the ivory tower of palaces. This is what I mean by the clash, if you said that to a normal person, if you said that to a BBC journalist, if you said that to just about anyone, they'd go, "What the--"

In his mind, it all made sense, and this was his one chance he had of getting across everything that he thought would be persuasive.

Ruth Wilson: Michael said something interesting. Having studied that interview so much and having to recreate the language that is used, it wasn't written. That's verbatim, that interview that we do on the show, and it's not written, obviously, by a writer. It's Andrew's language, and he said-- It's so interesting. You see him trying to second guess what Emily knows and thinks him stopping, almost saying something, then backtracking and talking around it, so he is constantly within the speech himself, constantly second-guessing and trying to put the best front or his best version forward of events or what that might put forward, so it's fascinating.

He's inside his head constructing and creating and creating a narrative that he wants to put out there, but it's very convoluted. It's like a word salad.

Emily Maitlis: I guess the thing is that people around him knew he was going to say that. Now, if you had an advisor who'd heard you practicing those words in the mirror-

Ruth Wilson: You say no.

Emily Maitlis: -you'd say, "Stop there, we're not going to say that."

Ruth Wilson: We're not going to do the interview.

Emily Maitlis: We're not going to do the interview. You just say, "I do not recall," or whatever that your catchphrase is. I think this speaks again to that sense of the shelteredness of the lives in that palace. Was that when he said that out loud to his closest trusted advisor, she was able to turn to him and say, "Genuinely, that sounds excellent."

Ruth Wilson: Those interviews, we were saying that really, royals don't give interviews like that. They give short little interviews that are very controlled. They don't give one on one hour interviews, personal interviews, and when they do, it's usually because they're trying to put their narrative, their story forward. They want their voice to be heard, but it's the first time they've done that often, and it always ends in a global news story.

Alison Stewart: When you were preparing to play Emily, and I don't know if this is true or not, they called back the interview and then they said, "No, it's on." Is that the case?

Ruth Wilson: Oh, yes.

Alison Stewart: In the show, you run to the palace like a crazy person. Obviously, hair flying going on. You have to check in your phone. Did that actually happen?

Emily Maitlis: This is the weirdest thing of all, that the interview was called off. My team were told that it had been canceled and they didn't even tell me because they took on so much of that stress and the heat, they didn't tell me it was called off because they still believed that they could get it back on again, and they didn't want my head to be like, "Oh, my God, is it on? Is it off? What am I doing?" God bless them, they just kept that from me completely. In the drama, we show it where she gets the call from Stewart Maclean, and then Stuart says that Esme Wren is trying to get it back on again, and so you see it actually playing out.

I only learnt from this drama, from that script that that had happened. It was a freaky thing for me. I was like, "Haha, he's taking some liberties. I don't think that happened." They were like, "No, no, it did. We just tried to protect you."

Ruth Wilson: You had a big bag, didn't you, full of other clothes?

Emily Maitlis: I had a big bag.I had this huge gym bag. It was like a sweaty Betty Bag, and I ran across the Buckingham Palace courtyard with all this stuff flying all over the place because I'd come with too many bits of outfits because I didn't know if it was going to be on, if it was going to be off or was it going to be inside. Was it not? Was I wearing the right stuff? Was I going to have to change? That's how the whole thing opens.

Alison Stewart: One thing I noticed in watching the movie is that it's a very female-forward movie. Down to his daughters, down to Fergie, down to you two, you two, you two [laughs]. When you were working on it, did it come forward as a female-forward script or was that something just you realized? You looked up and went, "Wait."

Ruth Wilson: I think, weirdly, because Emily's involvement in it always felt, and obviously, the character of Emily is central to it, you have a female perspective, but actually, it was, when I was watching it, I thought, "Oh, wow, the female story's really coming to the fore, and the character of Beatrice becomes almost the heart of the story because it's the fallout that happens for all the women in Prince Andrew's life and the daughters that have to hear that or see it in the papers and hear those stories being told about their father and question whether it's true or not, and so you start to see the impact on all the women in his life.

I didn't really realize that when I read the script and it became really clear. Julian did a brilliant job in directing it, of bringing that to the fore. Of course, then we land as well on Virginia Giuffre, the victim's at the heart of this as well.

Alison Stewart: We've got about a minute, minute and a half left. The idea of journalists becoming a story shouldn't happen. That's not supposed to happen, and it did happen to you. You heard it in the trailer. What was that like?

Emily Maitlis: It doesn't feel right. It doesn't feel comfortable. I love watching Ruth bring this to life, and I love watching what Michael does. The whole cast is unbelievable, so it is a joy of a drama to watch just because you get the richness of palace life and you get the clash of the journalist life, but honestly, I'm always like, "Forget the BBC side. Just concentrate on the palace stuff." Because-

Alison Stewart: It bothers you.

Emily Maitlis: -it still makes me feel slightly uncomfortable.

Alison Stewart: Don't keep that in mind. Watch the show anyway. A Very Royal Scandal drops on September 19th. My guests have been Emily Maitlis and Ruth Wilson. Thank you for coming to the studio.

Ruth Wilson: Thanks for having us.

Emily Maitlis: Thank you so much. Thanks.

 

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