Rufus Sewell is to star within the eagerly awaited drama fictionalising Prince Andrew’s notorious interview on the BBC’s flagship present affairs present, Newsnight.
The movie, which begins taking pictures in London this month, may even characteristic Gillian Anderson as Emily Maitlis, the then-lead presenter on the present, who carried out the interview, extensively perceived to be a exceptional coup for the programme and an ill-advised transfer by the prince.
Billie Piper will star as Sam McAlister, the producer who secured and oversaw the interview, and who wrote the ebook – Scoops: Behind the Scenes of the BBC’s Most Stunning Interviews – on which the movie relies. In the meantime, Keeley Hawes will play Amanda Thirsk, former personal secretary to Prince Andrew.
Within the interview, broadcast in November 2019, Prince Andrew sought to clear himself of wrongdoing linked to his affiliation with Jeffrey Epstein, who had been discovered lifeless in his jail cell three months earlier than.
Maitlis examined the connection between the royal and the convicted offender, in addition to his affiliate Ghislaine Maxwell, who’s presently serving a 20-year sentence for intercourse trafficking.
The prince expressed remorse within the interview about his continued affiliation with Epstein after the financier’s 2008 admission of soliciting underage intercourse. However he stated he didn’t remorse the friendship itself because it led to connections which had been “really very helpful”.
He additionally provided no apology to the victims of Epstein’s crimes and made a lot of statements protesting his personal innocence over claims made by Virginia Giuffre that she was pressured to have intercourse with him when she was 17.
These included his denial that they’d had intercourse in 2001 saying he had been at Pizza Specific in Woking that night, and that Giuffre’s claims about dancing with him at a membership in London whereas he was sweaty had been false as he had quickly misplaced the flexibility to sweat after an “adrenaline overdose” through the Falklands struggle.
Prince Andrew has largely disappeared from public life for the reason that interview, however efforts to revive his popularity proceed. Final month, the Sunday Telegraph printed a staged {photograph} of two individuals, sporting masks of Prince Andrew and Giuffre, in a shower at Maxwell’s residence, in an obvious try to discredit the latter’s allegations.
Scoop is a Netflix manufacturing, initially introduced final autumn, when Hugh Grant was linked to the position of Prince Andrew – to the apparent surprise of his representatives. McAlister’s ebook has been tailored by Peter Moffat, whose earlier credit embrace the Bryan Cranston collection Your Honor and the 2004 movie Hawking, which gained approval for star Benedict Cumberbatch as Stephen Hawking.
Philip Martin, who has beforehand directed Anderson in The Crown, will direct. In a press release launched on Tuesday, he stated: “Uptempo, immersive and cinematic, I wish to put the viewers contained in the breathtaking sequence of occasions that led to the interview with Prince Andrew – to inform a narrative a couple of seek for solutions, in a world of hypothesis and ranging recollections. It’s a movie about energy, privilege and differing views and the way – whether or not in glittering palaces or hi-tech newsrooms – we choose what’s true.”
