Earlier this year, I watched Scoop, the dramatization of what happened “behind the scenes” of Prince Andrew’s absolutely disastrous 2019 Newsnight interview. The movie made me really sad, that the BBC had one brief moment of speaking truth to power and they’re still talking about years later, like “remember that time we did something good?” Well, a second movie has been made about everything around the interview. This one is A Very Royal Scandal, with Michael Sheen playing Prince Andrew. Sheen is not a royalist or a monarchist. He wants the monarchy abolished. But he also enjoys a juicy character study, and so he seemingly had a good time playing degenerate Andrew. Sheen recently spoke to People Mag about the role and what he thinks of Andrew:
His research into Andrew: A 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.”
Sheen also noticed Andrew’s teeth: “He has quite prominent teeth. 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.”
Would Sheen want to be a royal? “Absolutely not. 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.”
The compromises at the heart of the monarchy: “I’d always quite naively imagined that the media and the royal family were quite separate institutions. 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.”
What he learned about Prince Andrew: “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.”
“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.” It feels obvious at this point, but I do think that Prince Harry has done a lot to expose just that, how the British media and monarchy do not operate as separate institutions. They work together, hand in hand, and sometimes their relationship is parasitic and sometimes it’s symbiotic. Honestly, Sheen almost seems sympathetic towards the Windsors when he talks about how they don’t have the freedoms regular people take for granted. I think he’s just saying that sh-t because he’s promoting this Prime movie though. He really doesn’t give a sh-t. Here’s the trailer:
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.