Scoop movie review: Thrillingly staged and expertly performed, Netflix's dramatic retelling of the wheeling and dealing that went into organising Prince Andrew's infamous BBC interview could easily qualify as an episode of peak-era The Crown.
Slight but spirited, the new Netflix film Scoop excavates a recent historical event that even The Crown wouldn't dare to touch despite its interest in both the British royal family and scandals. Framed from the perspective of a collective of BBC journalists, Scoop traces the events leading up to Prince Andrew's jaw-dropping disintegration on national television, when he was caught like a deer in the headlights while being interviewed about his friendship with convicted sex pest Jeffrey Epstein.
Gillian Anderson plays Emily Maitlis, the long-time BBC news anchor who found herself in the enviable position of having secured an exclusive interview with the disgraced Duke of York, days after Epstein's suicide. It was the most widely-watched BBC Newsnight interview of all time, exposing Andrew's — and by extension, the royal family's — entitlement. It never occurred to Andrew that putting himself on TV trial could ever go south. Played with a savage ruthlessness by an unrecognisable Rufus Sewell, Andrew was convinced that all he had to do to make his problems disappear was to shrug, as if to say, “I had no idea.”
