‘Scoop’ star Rufus Sewell immediately regretted Prince Andrew role
Prince Andrew’s trainwreck of a BBC “Newsnight” interview in 2019 with journalist Emily Maitlis has been immortalized in an upcoming Netflix flick titled “Scoop.”
The drama will drop on the streamer April 5 with star Rufus Sewell as the disgraced Duke of York, 64, and Gillian Anderson as Maitlis.
Sewell, 56, sat down with “Good Morning Britain” on Wednesday to confess that the role of the royal stressed him out.
While “The Holiday” actor was initially excited for the part, he had regrets once he accepted.
“I felt I could get behind it, then afterwards, when I got the part, I was like, ‘Gosh what I have done?’ I’m not a natural mimic,” he explained.
Sewell “obsessively watched the interview” alongside the rest of the world when it first premiered five years prior.
“I was kind of transfixed for various reasons. Like most people, I had my own judgments,” he said.
“One of the reasons why I was so hesitant to take it was because I didn’t want to be seen as jumping on some bandwagon,” Sewell said. “I just wanted to do a truthful representation of him and that includes good and bad. It’s to show the light and dark, and we all have both. He is a human like everyone else.”
The infamous, disastrous “Newsnight” chat between Andrew and Maitlis was conducted in an effort to get to the bottom of the nature of the prince’s friendship with billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein died by suicide at age 66 in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan on Aug. 10, 2019, while awaiting trial for child sex-trafficking charges.
Andrew and Epstein were friends in the 2000s, with Andrew later being sued by Epstein victim Virginia Roberts Giuffre. She claimed that the financier sex-trafficked her to Andrew.
In 2022, Andrew and Giuffre reached a settlement in her sex abuse lawsuit against him. The sum of the settlement was not publicly disclosed, but a source told The Post the estimated total was $12 million.
Andrew — who was stripped of his military and royal titles amid the scandal — has long maintained his innocence.
In the interview, the son of the late Queen Elizabeth seemingly danced around the truth, even alleging that he “couldn’t sweat.”
Sewell noted Wednesday how he and co-star Anderson, 55, tried to make the story their own and “played out our version of events.”
“But doing it is a different thing and trying to put yourself in the position of someone like that and working out what their reasoning and justification in their own head might be. Because that’s what people do,” Sewell went on.
The actor continued: “And I spent hours and hours every day trying to work out what he was thinking. You could only ever guess. When there was a hesitation or a stutter, or a particular movement of the head — what was behind it?”
His transformation into the Falklands War naval officer shocked the cast and crew — due to Sewell’s “uncanny” resemblance.
“Scoop” will follow Maitlis and her TV producer Sam McAlister as they work to secure the interview — as well as how the chat went down and the aftermath.
Billie Piper, Keeley Hawes and Romola Garai also star in the feature.
This is not the first time the “Newsnight” talk will be brought to the small screen.
An Amazon television series titled “A Very Royal Scandal,” starring Michael Sheen as Andrew and Ruth Wilson as Maitlis, was announced in November 2023.
