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Before the current hoopla-slash-controversy regarding the Royals, and before the one before that, as well as the one before the one before the one before that, the events of Scoop (now on Netflix) took place. That was 2019, when creepy Prince Andrew’s palling-around with pedophile and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein finally caught up with him. The film is based on the book Scoops: Behind the Scenes of the BBC’s Most Shocking Interviews by Sam McAlister, a producer of BBC Two’s hard-hitting Newsnight program; the film zooms in on the infamous 2019 interview with Andrew, during which he didn’t come clean about the allegations of having sex with 17-year-old Virginia Giuffre, who was tied to Epstein. Andrew did, however, nuke his public standing by failing to acknowledge Epstein’s many victims, and by reeling off a bunch of stammering, unconvincing excuses ranging from “I don’t recall” to “I physically can’t sweat.” How and why, exactly, Andrew agreed to the interview in the first place is the key dramatic hinge of this slick, tense film.
SCOOP: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: We open in New York City, 2010, with photographer Jae Donnelly (Connor Swindells) staking out Epstein’s mansion, waiting for Prince Andrew (Rufus Sewell, still mostly recognizable beneath significant prosthetics and makeup) to emerge. Jae NEEDS this shot. He tails Andrew and Epstein through Central Park before he decides to scamper through a wooded area and aim his gigantic zoom lens on the two men. Chkchkchkchkchkchkchk goes the camera and there it is. Got ’em. A nice clear shot of their faces. A little context: Andrew and Epstein have been pals for years thanks to Ghislaine Maxwell, the former’s friend and the latter’s girlfriend. At this point, Andrew has been dodging a scandal in which he allegedly had sexual relations with Giuffre three times, and Epstein has already been convicted of sexual misconduct with a minor. Andrew, it seems, has stuck by his friend through tough times, and yes, I’m intentionally employing understatement to make both of them seem very, very gross, because they are, indeed, very, very gross.
Cut to the BBC offices. This being the 21st century, the media giant is staring down the barrel of significant layoffs, and no department or show will avoid the cuts. Now, I’ve been in that very same sword-of-Damocles situation at a news media company, and that’s why it’s easy to sympathize with Sam McAlister (Billie Piper), a lowish-level producer at Newsnight who not only is worried about her job, but also doesn’t really fit in (“She’s very Daily Mail,” one co-worker quips). With her leather pants and spiky heels, Sam doesn’t look the part of a typically bedraggled messy-hair-and-pizza-stains-on-their-shirt journo, but she knows the gig as well as any of them. She wouldn’t be good at her job if Amanda Thirsk (Keeley Hawes), Prince Andrew’s personal secretary, wasn’t one of her contacts, right? Sam reaches out and manages to connect with Amanda as a human being, while pursuing an interview with Andrew himself. The answer is no, of course, but Sam’s patient. Andrew’s been dogged by the Epstein association for years. Something has to break eventually.
And boy does it break. Epstein gets pinched once and for all by the FBI, then he dies by suicide in prison. And now all eyes are on Maxwell, and her old friend, who just so happens to be the son of the quing-quang-Queen of the United king-kang-Kingdom. Sam, producer Esme Wren (Romola Garai) and Newsnight host Emily Maitlis (Gillian Anderson) sit down with Andrew and Amanda to pitch the interview. This is a rare instance in which Emily – who will get someone on the show and grill them in the pursuit of all-caps JOURNALISM, and look amazing in a short skirt while doing it – is nervous and intimidated. And so relatively low-ranking Sam seals the deal with an offer Andrew can’t refuse: Public opinion is shaping his story, and this is his chance to tell it himself. He thinks about it to the extent that he can think about anything, which might not be very much, and then he agrees. And Emily wears pants to the interview. They have to keep Randy Andy focused, you know.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Frost/Nixon dramatized a very famous TV interview between a disgraced bulldog of an ex-president and a seemingly overmatched journalist; Spotlight dramatized the shoe-leather doggedness of reporters ripping the lid off a sex scandal (the big, very ugly Catholic Church one) while their journalistic institution continues to erode with the changing times. Oh, and soon to Amazon Prime Video, another installment of A Very Royal Scandal, with Maitlis as a producer and Michael Sheen as Andrew.
Performance Worth Watching: Three fine performances provide Scoop’s sturdy foundation: Piper as the emotional heart of the story; Anderson alternates between Emily’s steely persona and a woman vulnerable to nerves and propriety; Hawes as a woman who’s just now realizing that her loyalty has long masked her suffering. But the kicker scene belongs to Sewell in a darkly comic scene in which Andrew chastises a servant for not arranging his beloved stuffed animals on his bed to his liking.
Memorable Dialogue: Sam seals the deal with Andrew: “An hour of TV can change everything. It’s like magic.”
Sex and Skin: A brief shot of Sewell’s prosthetically padded princely patoot emerging from the bath.
Our Take: Power of the Fourth Estate/Rah Rah for Journalism movies like Scoop endear themselves to critics for some reason; as they say, you get three guesses, and the first two don’t count. The subgenre risks being indulgent, but this film mostly avoids an air of self-aggrandizement. More notable is its glossy look and confident execution, director Philip Martin (a TV veteran of, most notably, The Crown) getting the most from his cast and building considerable tension to the Big Interview, which proceeds with breathless suspense even though most of us already know how it plays out.
The performances render the climactic sequence more as true drama than mere reenactment. Sewell and Anderson are fully engaged in the moment, a moment in which either participant could potentially destroy themselves. Emily can’t be too aggressive or accommodating, and Andrew perhaps doesn’t realize he needs to highwire it, despite, well, as a clueless and sheltered sort who unwittingly finds himself outside his bubble, being pretty bad at it. Their pauses and silences inflate, and hold, hold, hold, with an increasing sense of consequence as the interview progresses. This wasn’t a softball reporter throwing together a puff piece. It was a female journalist – with two other women by her side – asking difficult questions of a serial boor wielding significant influence and power. Emily, Sam and Esme understood the optics, substance and implications of the moment, and Andrew did not.
And so Scoop delivers a feminist missive with admirable understatement, and nicely coordinates it with a depiction of boots-on-the-ground journalism, the tact and negotiation that precedes hardline questioning, that it’s not always about eliciting a bald confession, but allowing one’s subject to hang themselves with tone, mannerisms and the things left unsaid. The film might’ve been better served as a nuts-and-bolts procedural; as it stands, it exists in a sort of neverland between that and a character-driven BOATS (Based On A True Story) drama. But it moves quickly, thoughtfully and suspensefully, touching on the dynamic among the Newsnight hierarchy (Emily’s posh eccentricity as the famous face of the show, Sam’s more grounded struggles as a small cog, and a single mother) and implying that Amanda’s loyalty to Andrew perhaps began to dissipate long before Sam made that first call.
The film nicely balances the greater and smaller politics of the situation without making any grandiose statements about the role gritty journalism has in taking down cads like Andrew. Eventually, about an hour in, it digs into the character stuff that shows the personal sacrifice it often takes to make the world at least a slightly better place, but it doesn’t get sentimental. No bootstrapping journo would want it that way, anyway.
Our Call: Scoop is a rock-solid, occasionally riveting drama underscoring journalism’s role in holding bad people accountable. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
