‘Scoop’ star Keeley Hawes on finding a sympathetic lens for Prince Andrew’s private secretary [Exclusive Video Interview]

Prince Andrew and BBC journalist Emily Maitlis were the public faces of the infamous 2019 Newsnight interview that left the Duke of York in disgrace and eventually led to his removal from official royal life. But in the weeks leading up to the disastrous media failure, two women worked diligently behind the scenes to make the interview happen: BBC producer Sam McAlister and Prince Andrew’s longtime private secretary, Amanda Thirsk.

“I think they’re great friends. They worked together for a long time,” actress Keeley Hawes tells Gold Derby in an exclusive video interview. In the new Netflix film “Scoop,” directed by Philip Martin and written for the screen by Peter Moffat, Hawes plays Thirsk, a dedicated believer in the royal family who worked with Prince Andrew for almost 20 years.

“She was a trusted confidant. She was very fond of him,” Hawes says. “I don’t know what it is now. I don’t know anything about that. But they enjoyed working together. There was great trust there. And I really do think that Amanda wanted everyone to see Prince Andrew as she saw him and to have her experience of him. And it didn’t go as planned, as we know.”

Based on the book by McAlister (who is played in the film by Billie Piper), “Scoop” focuses largely on the women who helped facilitate the historic Prince Andrew interview after his connections with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein came to light. In the wake of the widely seen interview – which despite Prince Andrew’s feelings to the contrary landed with a thud among the general public – Prince Andrew stepped back from his public duties. Years later, he was stripped of his titles and also paid a settlement to Virginia Giuffre, the woman who claimed Epstein trafficked her to have sex with Epstein’s friends – including allegedly Prince Andrew – when she was underage in the United States at the time. (Prince Andrew has repeatedly denied Giuffre’s claims.)

In playing Thirsk, a key figure in the interview’s mythology, Hawes had a difficult line to walk: embodying a real person but one who isn’t in the public eye. There are no significant interviews with Hawes and she never wrote a book about her experiences with the royal family.

“There is always a responsibility that comes with playing a real person, whether they’re well known or not. You have to be incredibly respectful. Not everybody is up for having their private life made into a Netflix movie,” Hawes, who spoke to Gold Derby while getting ready for the Met Gala on May 6, says. (She appeared at the exclusive event alongside her husband, Emmy winner Matthew Macfadyen.). “So I felt a certain pressure with that. But it came down to speaking at Sam, who had gotten to know Amanda really quite well. And so I was able to get more of a sense about her from Sam more than anything else. People who do know her, I’ve spoken to them since and they’ve been very encouraging that it is, as much as possible, a truthful portrayal. So that makes me feel a bit better.”

As “Scoop” winds its way toward its finale – a recreation of the interview that takes up nearly 20 minutes of the film’s running time – Amanda becomes a tragic figure in her own right: a character determined she’s doing the right thing even though the audience knows her failure is assured. (Thirsk resigned two months after the interview aired.)

“People have felt very sympathetic towards her, and I think she is a sympathetic character,” Hawes says. “I certainly don’t feel judgmental towards her. I think she made the decisions, did what she did, and gave the advice she gave. And it came from a well-meaning place.”

“Scoop” is streaming now on Netflix.

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