Scoop trailer depicts downfall of Prince Andrew, if you're interested in more royal drama

The British royal family has been the subject of much tabloid gossip and online speculation lately due to Kate Middleton’s lack of public appearances. (Do you think it’s all a cover up to help promote Prince William’s mistress?) But it’s just one of many royal scandals that have sparked fascination both at home and across the pond, from Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s departure to Prince Charles and Camilla’s “Tampongate.” But sometimes the tawdriness of these affairs obfuscates the fact that these are powerful people sometimes (perhaps often) abusing their status to behave badly—as is the case in Prince Andrew’s association with Jeffrey Epstein. That particular scandal is handled with appropriate gravity in the trailer for the new film Scoop, premiering on Netflix on April 5.

“Inspired by real events, Scoop is the inside account of the tenacious journalism that landed an earth shattering interview—Prince Andrew’s (played by Rufus Sewell) infamous BBC Newsnight appearance. From the tension of producer Sam McAlister’s (played by Billie Piper) high stakes negotiations with Buckingham Palace, all the way to Emily Maitlis’ (played by Gillian Anderson) jaw dropping, forensic showdown with the Prince, Scoop takes us inside the story, with the women who would stop at nothing to get it,” reads a synopsis of the film from Netflix, which does add a bit of dramatic flair with the tagline: “To get an interview this big, you have to be bold.”

Scoop is bringing in the Brit performer heavyweights with Anderson, Piper, Sewell, and Romola Garai. Based on McAlister’s behind-the-scenes book on the interview, the trailer depicts her defying the odds to get close to Prince Andrew and coax him into sitting in front of cameras—which includes name-dropping his “Randy Andy” nickname to his face. Sewell, meanwhile, is nearly unrecognizable as the defensive, square-faced prince, whose position becomes more and more untenable as the Epstein situation becomes more dire. It might’ve been a better PR move to put his head down and fade gracefully from the public eye, but Piper (as McAlister) tells his team that “you can’t stay silent.”

Andrew, obviously convinced, observes to Maitlis in the trailer that “I thought that all went very well.” The irony there, of course, is that the BBC Newsnight interview did not go well for Andrew at all. His strange, bumbling answers made the prince a laughingstock and he was eventually stripped of many of his titles and patronages, forced into a retirement from public life. And though The Crown didn’t get to this particular chapter of royal disasters, Netflix still obviously sees the value in mining the family for content. “Make no mistake, if we don’t get the tone right, the story won’t be him,” Garai’s Esme Wren warns in the trailer. “It’ll be us.” As evidenced by the movie itself, it turns out, the story was both!