As the real-life drama surrounding Princess Kate Middleton’s disappearance continues, Netflix is gearing up for an exploration of a different royal scandal.
The streaming platform just dropped the first trailer for the upcoming movie Scoop, which tells the story of Prince Andrew’s now-infamous 2019 interview with the BBC’s Newsnight. “An hour of television can change everything,” actress Billie Piper (as producer Sam McAlister) begins in the teaser, which debuted on Monday, March 18.
Scoop stars Rufus Sewell — wearing serious prosthetics — as Andrew, now 64, while Gillian Anderson plays Newsnight anchor Emily Maitlis. The film is based on McAlister’s 2023 memoir, Scoops: Behind the Scenes of the BBC’s Most Shocking Interviews. McAlister secured the sit-down with Andrew, which eventually led to him stepping down from his role as a working member of the royal family.
“I’ve never been smuggled into a palace before,” Anderson says as Maitlis.
The trailer then hints at the connection between Andrew and the late Jeffrey Epstein, who died by suicide in August 2019 while he was awaiting trial on charges of sex trafficking of minors. Three months later, Andrew’s BBC interview aired and raised more questions than it answered about his relationship with Epstein.
“You know, I thought that all went very well,” Sewell says in the teaser as Andrew.
During the interview, Andrew claimed that he had no recollection of ever meeting Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who claimed that Epstein forced her to have sex with Andrew when she was a teenager. While he denied Giuffre’s allegations against him, Andrew said he did not regret his friendship with Epstein. He also made headlines for claiming that he couldn’t have been “profusely sweating” on the dance floor with Giuffre (as she claimed) because he has a medical inability to sweat after suffering from an overdose of adrenaline during the Falklands War.
Shortly after the interview aired, Andrew announced a plan to “step back from public duties” with the permission of his mother, the late Queen Elizabeth II. In May 2020, he permanently resigned from all public roles. Elizabeth later stripped him of his royal patronages and military titles in early 2022. (Andrew is the third child of Elizabeth, who died in September 2022, and Prince Philip, who died in April 2021.)
Giuffre sued Andrew in 2021, accusing him of sexual assault and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Andrew denied all the allegations against him. The duo settled out of court in February 2022.
Scoop premieres on Netflix Friday, April 5.
