Michael Sheen Reveals Why He Would Never Want to Be a Member of the Royal Family (Exclusive)

The actor portrays Prince Andrew in Prime Video’s three-part series ‘A Very Royal Scandal,’ about Queen Elizabeth's son's disastrous 2019 BBC ‘Newsnight’ interview

When preparing to portray Prince Andrew in Prime Video’s A Very Royal Scandal, actor Michael Sheen found one particular quirk in the royal’s mannerisms that stood out during his research.

A Very Royal Scandal, which explores the events leading up to and following the infamous 2019 BBC Newsnight interview with Emily Maitlis that effectively ended Prince Andrew’s royal career, is not Michael Sheen’s first time portraying a real-life figure. Known for his role as journalist David Frost in 2008’s Frost/Nixon, Sheen has also twice played former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair — in 2010’s The Special Relationship and 2006’s The Queen, which focused on Andrew’s mother, Queen Elizabeth. However, when it came to embodying Prince Andrew for Amazon’s three-part series, it was the Duke's distinctive laugh that stood out to Sheen.

“In the research, when I’m looking at all the footage and interviews, I’m waiting for something to kind of jump up and grab me,” Sheen tells PEOPLE ahead of the show’s Sept. 19 release. “In every character that I’ve played, eventually something just kind of catches you and you go, ‘Oh.’ And sometimes it takes a little while before you realize that you’ve already found that moment and you go back to it. But there’s always something.”

Related: Tensions Run High in New Trailer for Prince Andrew Drama A Very Royal Scandal (Exclusive)

That moment of revelation for Sheen came while watching an interview Prince Andrew gave "maybe 15 years ago," he recalls. In the interview, Andrew is asked whether he had any advice for Prince William, likely regarding military service. Andrew, who served in a different branch of the armed forces than William, makes a joke about the rivalry between the services. "He says, ‘I should have said you should be in the Navy,’ and then he laughs, and the laugh he does is so startling. It was sort of extraordinary. I’d never seen that before — it was an exposed moment in a way. And that really stuck with me.”

It was jarring, Sheen explains, because, “For the royal family, who are usually so controlled, trying to keep things very much under the surface, it was a moment of startling, shocking emotion — even if it was just a laugh. But there was something about it that I thought was quite telling, so that stayed with me.”

A physical feature stood out, too. “He has quite prominent teeth,” Sheen says of Prince Andrew. “He’s quite toothy. So the combination of the relish of this kind of joke that he’d made and then those teeth — it was quite shocking.”

Sheen has now played a royal, but would he want to be a royal? “Absolutely not,” he tells PEOPLE. “No. The fairytale image of it seems so extraordinary — living in palaces and having everything you want and servants and all that kind of stuff. But the reality seems to be that there are far more restrictions than there are freedoms. No amount of wealth or assets or privilege can make up for not being able to have basic sort of freedoms that a lot of us take for granted. So no, I would not want to have that life.”

Playing Prince Andrew gave Sheen not only into what it must be like to be a royal but also about the institution of the monarchy itself, he says.

“I’d always quite naively imagined that the media and the royal family were quite separate institutions,” he tells PEOPLE. “But then it became clear that there’s all these sort of negotiations that go on between them, and there’s a kind of, you know, ‘Well, if you do this, then we’ll do that. And if you give us this interview, we’ll hide this thing.’ You know, it’s a real — there are deals being done all the time between the two institutions, which I found fascinating, and I didn’t realize that. That was a big surprise.”

Sheen explains that when it comes to portraying characters, especially someone like Prince Andrew,  he tries to tap into what’s going on beneath the surface.

“What makes this person tick?” Sheen says of how he prepared to play a person very much still in the headlines, even after Andrew's role as a working royal ended. “What are the things that they want? And what do they think is stopping them from getting what they want?”

He adds, “If you don’t have that, if it’s just the surface stuff and the tics and the physical things. An audience might enjoy that for a couple of minutes, but you can’t tolerate that for a three-hour series. There has to be something more substantial.”

Related: Michael Sheen Transforms Into Prince Andrew for Amazon Prime's Upcoming Series 'A Very Royal Scandal'

The most obvious footage for Sheen to study as he prepared to play the royal was the gripping interview that aired nearly five years ago, where veteran journalist Emily Maitlis (played by Ruth Wilson in A Very Royal Scandal) asked Prince Andrew about the scandalous accusations he faced regarding his involvement with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and Virginia Guiffre, who accused Andrew of having sex with her when she was 17 years old. But the Newsnight footage wasn’t the only clip Sheen combed through — and he says he was particularly moved by footage of Prince Andrew returning from the Falklands War “and seeing the adoration that he had,” Sheen says. “He came back from the Falklands War having genuinely done acts of courage. I mean, he was right in the thick of it. You’d think a royal would be kept away from danger, but he was right in the thick of it.”

Sheen says that “he comes back and there’s that footage of him dockside when he comes off the boat. And there are thousands upon thousands of people just cheering and shouting, and he looks so attractive and sexy and, you know, handsome. And he’s there in his uniform and he’s the most eligible bachelor, and he’s a prince. It’s like the absolute height of everything. And to think about how since that moment, his life could be perceived as being a sort of downward trajectory where he gets older, he puts on weight, he loses his looks a bit. He gets further and further away from the center of power of being what’s known as the ‘spare.’ The brother who’s never going to be king. As [King] Charles has children and he gets further and further away, and all those things that must have given him a sense of his worth and value and pride, all those things ebb away. So it was that footage of him coming back [that] had a huge impact on me.”

Reflecting on what he learned about the Duke of York, Sheen says, “I was very surprised by, for someone who, despite being perceived as having such privilege, entitlement and what you would imagine is great wealth, seemed, at least from the outside, to be someone who felt like they were being denied so much. Part of the draw towards Epstein was not only that there was some financial help there. That a prince could be in money trouble seemed extraordinary. Someone who you think is going to be incredibly wealthy seemed to have money troubles and also seemed to be drawn to a community where he would be treated like a prince. [He] didn’t feel like he was being treated like a prince in his own country somehow. That I found extraordinary. And quite surprising that someone who appears to have so much could experience their life as having relatively little.”

Soon after the Newsnight interview aired, Prince Andrew announced he was stepping back from public duties, and in January 2022, Queen Elizabeth stripped him of his military titles and patronages amid Guiffre’s civil sexual assault lawsuit that has since been settled. Prince Andrew has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.

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When it comes to Sheen and the royal family, the actor took a decisive step away from the institution in his own life: in 2017, eight years after receiving a Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to drama from Queen Elizabeth in 2009, the Welsh actor quietly handed back the award after looking into the history of the relationship between England and Wales for the 2017 Raymond Williams Society lecture, PEOPLE previously reported.

“By the time I had finished writing that lecture…I remember sitting there going, ‘Well, I have a choice — I either don’t give this lecture and hold on to by OBE, or I give this lecture and I have to give my OBE back,’” Sheen said in a conversation with The Guardian columnist Owen Jones.

Despite feeling “incredibly honored” at receiving the award, Sheen expressed discomfort with practices such as handing the Prince of Wales title to an English-born heir to the throne — a tradition started in 1301 when King Edward I gave his son the title of Prince of Wales to subdue a Welsh rebellion. “These things have power,” Sheen said.

In 2017, when Sheen returned the award, King Charles was still Prince of Wales; in 2022, following the death of Queen Elizabeth, the title passed to his eldest son, Prince William, who holds it today.

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