Billie Piper (Doctor Who) takes on the role of Sam McAlister, the booker who relentlessly chases the lead. In preparation for the role, the actor studied the real McAlister to gain an understanding of her voice and her mannerisms. For the real-life McAlister, who executive-produces Scoop, watching Piper play her onscreen and seeing the circumstances of her life play out felt exciting and surprising: “There’s almost an incredulity to it: the fact that he said yes . . . the fact that he went ahead with the interview, and the fact that these women put all of that together.”

When Scoop opens, the Newsnight team is facing a precarious moment, with BBC leadership announcing major layoffs. McAlister is the odd woman out at the program. A scrappy reporter at an old-school institution, she can get a story but no respect. Looking to make a splash, she decides to go after the sit-down with Andrew after a series of scandals has made him a tabloid fixture and an embarrassment to Buckingham Palace. After a great deal of convincing, Andrew assents, hoping for an opportunity to remake his public image and regain some high ground among his subjects.

“He was the forgotten prince, a problem prince who had gone from a hero to a zero,” McAlister explains. “Princess Beatrice [Andrew’s daughter] was going to get married; he wanted to walk her down the aisle. He was about to turn 60; he wanted to enjoy his birthday. He wanted to go back to the wonderful way of life that he had had. I understood, on a human level, that was what was going to really motivate him to try and turn his royal life around.”

Naïvely, Andrew’s loyal private secretary Amanda Thirsk (Keeley Hawes, Bodyguard) believes the Newsnight interview will do just that, assuming the prince’s charisma alone will be sufficient to win over audiences. “She wanted everybody to see Prince Andrew the way that she saw him,” Hawes says. “She thought that would be a really positive thing. As we now know, it was not to be.” 

In reality, it took nearly a year of back-and-forth between McAlister and the prince’s team before the interview was a done deal — for director Martin, reading how the tense negotiations unfolded in Moffat and Bussetil’s screenplay, he felt that Scoop played like a nail-biting thriller as McAlister goes after her man. “I was blown away when I read [the] script,” Martin shares. “It had such energy, such pace, such a lovely tonal complexity to it. It combines worlds that are serious with worlds that are absurd, surreal, and comic.”

To capture that energy onscreen, he sought an actor who could play Andrew as a man who once had been immensely popular but, in his older years, had become blinded to his problematic behavior by unimaginable privilege. The director felt Sewell was an immediate choice. “Rufus has this energy, this charisma that he embraces,” says Martin. “He understood that Prince Andrew, 20 or 30 years earlier, had charmed the crowds, was a celebrity, and was, in some ways, the relatable royal.” 

Transforming Sewell into Prince Andrew required the star to wear prosthetics on his lower face. “It was really useful to have that stuff put on me slowly and just watch him begin to emerge,” Sewell explains. “We made the decision to make me a little less like him; more like a strange fusion of the two of us. Similarly, with the voice and the walk and gestures, with certain things you can go so far, and then it actually starts getting your attention in the wrong way.” 

The production also took great pains to ensure that the BBC offices and Buckingham Palace were represented with the greatest possible authenticity. “We found the biggest locations that we could find to mimic what it’s like to be in Buckingham Palace,” Martin says. “We built a huge BBC set with televisions on, playing live news, and we edited and created content for all those TVs. It was an enormous challenge, but an amazing experience.” 

When Scoop arrives at the pivotal day of the interview, the film doesn’t flinch — and neither did Sewell or Anderson when Martin suggested they shoot the sequence as one long take, rather than in smaller scenes as had originally been scripted. “The first take was amazing,” Martin recalls, “and, in some ways, Gillian and Rufus understood the interview in a way that I didn’t fully appreciate until that moment.” Adds Sewell: “For two days, Gillian and I just did it on a loop without any rehearsal. It was like being in this strange, not entirely pleasant bubble for a couple days where no one would call ‘Cut.’” Anderson likens performing the extended scene to appearing onstage. “It was like a piece of theater,” says the actor. “It was like the first act of a play. It was incredible.”

Every piercing look from Anderson and dismissive chortle from Sewell rings true — to prepare, Sewell admits he spent a great deal of time scrutinizing archival footage to learn every nuance of how Andrew speaks and squirms his way through the uncomfortable back and forth. “I was working for hours and hours, just obsessing over this interview and what I thought was going on behind what he was doing,” says Sewell. “All those attempts to redescribe and distract and attempt to tell the truth and attempt to evade.”

Although Scoop does offer glimpses into palace life, the inner workings of the royal family are never the focus. Instead, the film is squarely about the value of the free press and the women holding power to account. “It’s about who those women are, how their interview made its way to the screen,” Piper says. “It’s about the unsung journalists behind the scoop itself.”