Michael Sheen on playing Prince Andrew: ‘I didn’t know the most important thing about this character’
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Michael Sheen tells The News Agents about his role playing Prince Andrew, in a new drama about Emily Mailtis’s 2019 interview with the royal.
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Read time: 4 minutes
In Brief…
- Sheen says it’s a ‘rare’ opportunity to play a character whose truth is unknown.
- The actor says he had to make his own mind up on Prince Andrew’s guilt, in secret, to be able to play the character fully.
- He says it is a story of a man being pushed ‘further and further from relevance’.
Michael Sheen says that new Amazon Prime series, A Very Royal Scandal has a “dark heart” at the centre of its story.
And that story is one you might already know – it’s a new dramatisation of The News Agents’ presenter Emily Maitlis’s interview with Prince Andrew, which took place in 2019, in which she grilled the royal on his alleged relationship with disgraced US businessman and sex offender, Jeffrey Epstein.
Sheen says this “dark heart” or “black hole” is the ambiguity about whether Prince Andrew was involved in any of the crimes Epstein was convicted for.
“There's a mystery at the heart of it, isn't there – we don't know,” he tells Emily Maitlis and Lewis Goodall.
“There hasn't been a legal case. We don't know definitively what happened or what didn't happen, what he did or didn't do – and of course, that's incredibly rare.
“When I come to play a character, I usually know the most important things about that character, but the central, most important thing about this character, I didn't know.”
Prince Andrew was a friend of financier Jeffrey Epstein, who faced numerous criminal allegations – including procuring a child for prostitution and soliciting a prostitute, which he admitted to in court.
Allegations were also made against Prince Andrew by Virginia Giuffre, who was allegedly trafficked for sex by Epstein, and claimed the royal was among a number of men to have sex with her when she was 17.
The prince has denied all claims against him.
“I had to make a decision about what I thought he had done or didn't do,” Sheen tells The News Agents.
“I’ve never told anybody what that is. I have to, otherwise I'm playing scenes and there's a void in the scene.
“I have to know where it's coming from.”
The BBC interview was arranged, and took place, in November 2019 in Buckingham Palace.
In it, he said Giuffre's claims could not be true because he had been to PizzaExpress in Woking on the night in question. He denied having meeting her, being photographed with her, or being upstairs in the London property the assault was alleged to have taken place.
It was also in this interview where Prince Andrew claimed he didn't sweat.
Sheen says he doesn't believe good drama asks its audience to sympathise with its lead characters, but says in this instance he was keen to make sure they would be able to "try and imagine what it might be like to be in that position."
"My responsibility is to try and make this character as rounded as possible and as human as possible," he says.
"No matter what they've done or what people's opinions of them might be, no matter what my opinion of them might be, there is the possibility for an audience to suddenly, whether involuntarily, almost be suddenly seeing what's going on from their eyes.
"Now that's a challenge when it comes to a character like Andrew, where people do have very strong opinions. That is quite challenging for an audience."
He says the interview, and the Amazon Prime show is the story of having "everything taken away from you, having to fight everything, everything being pushed further and further away from the centre of relevance and interest."
But he insists he stopped short of trying to make viewers sympathise with Prince Andrew.
"I am just going to try and make this character as real as possible. I'm not going to pull out any tricks or gimmicks to get the audience to like the character," he adds.
"My responsibility is to be absolutely warts and all, but – and in this case of course – it's not so much the warts and all bit that's the problem. It's the making him seem too likeable. It's the opposite."
Listen in full on The News Agents.
