It was described as the interview of the decade and won journalist Emily Maitlis network presenter of the year at the Royal Television Society Awards. It was also the interview where the British public learnt that Prince Andrew did not sweat for some time and that the royal had apparently attended a Pizza Express in Woking.
The 2019 BBC Newsnight interview between Maitlis and King Charles’ younger brother has gone down in history as being one of the most disastrous of all time – for its subject. Now it’s being turned into a Netflix feature film titled Scoop, starring Gillian Anderson as Maitlis, Rufus Sewell as Prince Andrew and Billie Piper as Newsnight booker Sam McAlister.
The star-studded reimagination now gets more starry as cast members Romola Garai, Lia Williams, Amanda Redman, Connor Swindells and Charity Wakefield have been announced today as joining the production.
Garai (Emma) will play then Newsnight Editor Esme Wren, Williams (The Lazarus Project) will play the BBC’s Director of News and Current Affairs, Fran Unsworth, and Redman (The Good Karma Hospital) will play Netta, McAlister’s mum.
Then Swindells (Sex Education) will play photographer Jae Donnelly, whose photos of Prince Andrew walking in the park with financier Jeffrey Epstein became such a key moment in the interview. Wakefield (The Great) will play Princess Beatrice, Andrew’s daughter.
The film, which has been written by award-winning BAFTA-winning writer Peter Moffat and writer Geoff Bussetil, is going to retell the story behind the interview, focusing on the women that “broke through the Buckingham Palace establishment to secure the scoop of the decade”.
The logline of the film continues: “From navigating Palace vetoes, to penetrating Prince Andrew’s inner circle, from the high stakes negotiations and rehearsal - to the jaw dropping interview itself. Scoop is the insider account of the inner workings of the Palace and the BBC, twin bastions of the British Establishment, spotlighting the journalists whose tenacity and guts broke through the highest of ceilings - and into the inner sanctum and calculations of a man with everything to lose.”
Here’s our breakdown of who is who in the upcoming feature film.
Emily Maitlis
Emily Maitlis is a seasoned journalist who has worked at Sky News, for Channel 4 and for various BBC news channels including BBC London News and BBC News at One. She was the lead anchor on Newsnight from 2018 to 2021, and now hosts the daily podcast The News Agents on LBC Radio alongside longtime BBC political correspondent Jon Sopel and journalist Lewis Goodall.
Speaking to Radio Times, Maitlis said that she fully realised the explosive nature of the interview when it came together in the editing room. “We’d assumed that he’d want to show empathy to the victims or pin the blame on Jeffrey Epstein. We couldn’t understand why he hadn’t done that. We definitely thought he’d be spikier,” she said.
“First, he was tackling the subject matter head on... Secondly, the lack of apology or any real expression of regret told me that the prince still believed that his actions had broadly been the right ones... And thirdly, the level of detail was unlike anything I was expecting.”
Newsnight booker Sam McAlister
Sam McAlister booked so many major figures over the years that she published a book about it in July last year titled Scoops: The BBC’s Most Shocking Interviews from Prince Andrew to Steven Seagal. Over her twelve years producing content for Newsnight, McAlister managed to bring numerous names including Stormy Daniels, Sean Spicer, Brigitte Hoess, Steven Seagal, Mel Greig and Julian Assange.
“Behind every great interview is a great booker,” said Piers Morgan. “Sam McAlister is one of the unsung heroes of television news.”
BAFTA-nominated McAlister, a trained barrister and single mum, was the first in her family to go to university. Speaking to Tortoise Media about clinching the Prince Andrew interview, she said: “I was obsessed. I knew what this was. I knew what we could bring to you as a programme if we got that interview, if it was done right.”
“This was all or nothing.”
Photographer Jae Donnelly
Another important moment in the bombshell interview revolved around a series of photographs that showed Epstein and Andrew walking together in Central Park which were taken after Epstein had pleaded guilty to child sex charges and had served 13 months behind bars.
The accusation put to Prince Andrew was that, whatever he knew or did not know in previous meetings with Epstein, during this walk he could not deny that he did not know about Epstein’s sexual misconduct. The photos seemed to prove that Prince Andrew remained friends with Epstein and did not care about the financier’s crimes.
The photos were taken by New York-based photographer Jae Donnelly, who describes himself as “hostile environment trained” and “commissioned for surveillance/ covert assignments”. Speaking to Vanity Fair in 2021, Donnelly said that photography for him was “gathering intel and evidence for whoever I’m on contract to find.”
In the Newsnight interview, Maitlis said: “He was released in July, within months by December of 2010 you went to stay with him at his New York mansion, why? Why were you staying with a convicted sex offender?”
Prince Andrew replied: “I went there with the sole purpose of saying to him that because he had been convicted, it was inappropriate for us to be seen together. I felt that doing it over the telephone was the chicken’s way of doing it. I had to go and see him and talk to him.”
Princess Beatrice
A birthday party that Princess Beatrice attended in 2001, became another turning point in the BBC interview. Prince Andrew said that he could not have been partying with 17-year-old Virginia Giuffre (then Virginia Roberts) because he was at Pizza Express in Woking on March 10, 2001.
In the interview, he said: “I was with the children and I’d taken Beatrice to a Pizza Express in Woking for a party at I suppose four or five in the afternoon. And then because the duchess [Sarah Ferguson] was away, we have a simple rule in the family that when one is away the other is there.”
As reported by the Mail, a source reportedly said that Princess Beatrice had “absolutely no recall whatsoever” of the Pizza Express party because she went to “any number” of meals at the Woking Pizza Express.
The Mail also reportedly received a statement from the parents of the girl whose Pizza Express party Beatrice apparently attended. “We had made a deliberate decision from the outset not to take photographs of, or around, Bea as it seemed to be permanently open season among some parents who indulged in this sport.
“The party was almost 20 years ago. We were living in Woking and had two daughters at prep school there. Not only were their birthdays celebrated in Pizza Express but almost every beginning of term, end of term and half-term. Pizza Express was just the place they liked to go for their treats.”
In January this year, Maitlis was at Davos and found herself in the same room as Princess Eugenie, Andrew’s youngest daughter. Speaking on The Political Party podcast, Maitlis said: “I feel very sort of respectful of his daughters and their life… I really wish them well and it shouldn’t impact on anything they do in their lives.”
Newsnight Editor Esme Wren
Esme Wren, who ran Newsnight for three years, was integral in making the Prince Andrew interview happen. It included her rehearsing questions with Maitlis, playing the role of Andrew. “Emily said that, in the role-playing, I’d been a lot tougher as Prince Andrew than he turned out to be in person,” Wren said.
In November 2021, just a couple of months before Sopel and Maitlis left the BBC, Wren quit her job as BBC Newsnight editor, becoming head of Channel 4 News. She replaced Ben De Pear, who had held the role since 2012.
BBC’s Director for News and Current Affairs, Fran Unsworth
65-year-old Fran Unsworth worked at the BBC for forty years but also left the corporation in autumn 2021. She began her career working for BBC Radio Leicester, BBC Radio Bristol, and BBC Radio 4, before moving on to be producer and editor for BBC One O’Clock News and BBC Six O’Clock News in 1993. She continued to work her way up over the following 30 years.
Over the years she was involved in many of the country’s biggest cases – be that as an editor, presenting evidence at a parliamentary select committee, or appearing on the BBC’s Newswatch programme. Unworth, perhaps most famously, was the editor who ordered the helicopter filming of the police raid on Cliff Richard’s home, for which Richard sued the BBC. Unsworth has also been president of the Society of Editors.
