The disgraced Prince is back in the hot seat.
The Netflix movie “Scoop,” (premiering April 5), dramatizes Prince Andrew’s famously disastrous November 2019 Newsnight interview.
The movie follows BBC anchor Emily Maitlis (Gillian Anderson) and her team as she interviews the Duke of York, 64, (Rufus Sewell) about his alleged relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein (who died of apparent suicide earlier that year).
She also presses Prince Andrew about Virginia Giuffre’s sex abuse allegations, which he denied (and in 2022, they settled her sex abuse lawsuit out of court).
In the real interview, Prince Andrew defended his choice to stay in a convicted sex offender’s home when he visited New York because he said that Epstein’s digs were, “A convenient place to stay.”
The car-crash of an interview led to Prince Andrew getting fired from official royal duties by his mom, Queen Elizabeth II.
“It was a devastating moment for both of them. His reputation is in tatters,” a source told The Sun at the time, referring to the overwhelming backlash.
Although “Scoop” includes many parts of the real interview verbatim, there are plenty of parts it omits.
Here are six key parts from the real Prince Andrew interview that “Scoop” omits.
Party Prince
In the real interview, Prince Andrew downplayed his “Party Prince” reputation.
“I never have really partied,” he said.
“I was single for quite a long time in the early 80s but then after I got married I was very happy and I’ve never really felt the need to go and party and certainly going to Jeffrey’s was not about partying, absolutely not.”
In the movie, as played by Rufus Sewell, Prince Andrew also downplays his “party Prince” moniker, but this entire quote does not appear in the dramatized version of the interview.
“Too honorable”
When Maitlin asked Prince Andrew why he stayed at the home of a convicted sex offender, Prince Andrew’s infamous reply is included in the movie: “It was a convenient place to stay.”
But the movie omits his equally bizarre elaboration after that, where he famously called himself “too honorable.”
“I mean I’ve gone through this in my mind so many times” Prince Andrew said in the real interview.
“At the end of the day, with a benefit of all the hindsight that one can have, it was definitely the wrong thing to do. But at the time I felt it was the honorable and right thing to do and I admit fully that my judgment was probably coloured by my tendency to be too honorable, but that’s just the way it is.”
No regrets
When Prince Andrew was asked if he regrets his alleged friendship with Epstein, he said, “Still not and the reason being is that the people that I met and the opportunities that I was given to learn either by him or because of him were actually very useful. He himself not, as it were, as close as you might think, we weren’t that close. So therefore I mean yes I would go and stay in his house but that was because of his girlfriend, not because of him.”
The movie includes Prince Andrew downplaying his friendship with Epstein in favor of saying he was better friends with Epstein’s girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, 62 – who was convicted in 2021 of recruiting and grooming young women to be sexually assaulted by Epstein.
Since July 2022, she has been serving a 20-year sentence in federal prison in Florida for sex trafficking.
The movie includes Prince Andrew praising Epstein as having, “The most extraordinary ability to bring extraordinary people together. And that’s the part that I remember, going to dinner parties, where you would meet academics, politicians…it was a cosmopolitan group.”
But it omits the longer quote about Epstein being “useful.”
“The sheer convenience”
The movie includes Prince Andrew’s ludicrous “It was a convenient place to stay” excuse for staying in Epstein’s New York townhouse. It also includes him stammering that he wasn’t only visiting Epstein during his time with the convicted sex offender, “I was doing a number of other things while I was there.”
But, it doesn’t include his further ramblings about it from the real interview, in which Prince Andrew said, “I could easily have gone and stayed somewhere else but the sheer convenience of being able to get a hold of the man was… I mean he was in and out all over the place. So getting him in one place for a period of time to actually have a long enough conversation…”
Unable to sweat
When Maitlis pressed Prince Andrew about Giuffre’s sexual assault allegations, she brought up how Giuffre recalled the Duke of York “sweating” during their time together.
Prince Andrew bizarrely denied this on the ground that he has a medical condition where he was unable to sweat.
This did make it into “Scoop,” his ludicrous excuse, “I have a peculiar medical condition which is that I don’t sweat or I didn’t sweat at the time and that was… was it… yes, I didn’t sweat at the time because I had suffered what I would describe as an overdose of adrenalin in the Falkland’s War when I was shot at and I simply… it was almost impossible for me to sweat.”
But, the second part of his comment didn’t make the cut: “It’s only because I have done a number of things in the recent past that I am starting to be able to [sweat] again.”
The photograph
Maitlis pressed Prince Andrew about the infamous photograph of Andrew with his arm around Giuffre when she was 17.
The movie included his denial, and his assertion that he has “absolutely no memory of that photograph ever being taken.”
But, it omitted his longer quote about the matter, where he said, “I’m terribly sorry but if I, as a member of the Royal Family, and I have a photograph taken and I take very, very few photographs, I am not one to, as it were, hug and public displays of affection are not something that I do. So that’s the best explanation I can give you and I’m afraid to say that I don’t believe that photograph was taken in the way that has been suggested.”
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