‘A Very Royal Scandal’: Michael Sheen on ‘Startling’ Prince Andrew Moment When Asked About William and Harry—’Really Stuck With Me’
First, the trailer and now the show. Amazon Prime Video’s A Very Royal Scandal is just days away from premiering, and star Michael Sheen has revealed which interview of Prince Andrew’s—not his 2019 Newsnight one the show’s about— shocked him while researching for the role. It had to do with his nephews, Prince William and Prince Harry, and their own military service.
Andrew’s laughter during a 2010 interview helped Sheen in ‘A Very Royal Scandal’
Speaking to People, Sheen revealed the moment that helped inform his portrayal of the Duke of York, 64, on screen. It came from watching a 2010 Sky News interview in which Andrew discussed his years in the Royal Navy in relation to the Prince of Wales and Duke of Sussex’s own military service.
“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 said. “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.”
The moment, the actor continued, came when Andrew “says, ‘I should have said you should be in the Navy,’ and then he laughs. 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.”
An interviewer suggested William wanted to serve on the front line like his younger brother but couldn’t as heir to the throne. “I have eminent sympathy for him,” Andrew replied. “I mean, when I say that they hadn’t come to me for advice. The simple piece of advice was usually to join the Navy,” he added with a laugh.
Sheen called it a “moment of startling, shocking emotion—even if it was just a laugh” for typically “controlled” British royals. “There was something about it that I thought was quite telling,” he added. “So that stayed with me.”
Other video footage of Andrew returning from war had a ‘huge impact’ on Sheen
That one particular 2010 interview wasn’t the only part of Sheen’s research that stuck with him. He also shared that footage of Andrew returning home from the Falklands War in 1982 “and seeing the adoration that he had” helped inform his character on screen.
“He comes back, and there’s that footage of him dockside when he comes off the boat,” Sheen said. “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.”
Since then, however, Andrew’s 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.”
Meanwhile, King Charles III “has children, and he [Andrew] 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,” Sheen concluded.
‘A Very Royal Scandal’ premieres on Sept. 19
Mark the calendar for Sept. 19, 2024, when A Very Royal Scandal begins streaming exclusively on Amazon Prime Video. The Affair’s Ruth Wilson stars opposite Sheen as Emily Maitlis, the journalist who sat down with Andrew for the 2019 Newsnight interview.
Unlike Netflix’s own version, Scoop, released earlier in 2024, A Very Royal Scandal is not a movie. Rather, it spans three episodes and is categorized as a miniseries.
