In October 2019, Prince Andrew sat for an interview with Emily Maitlis, one of the BBC’s star reporters. The disastrous interview went viral, and within weeks, Andrew announced he was taking a “step back” from his public work as a senior royal in disgrace. In the new documentary Secrets of Prince Andrew, Maitlis said she was sure someone was going to get in trouble for the interview, but she didn’t know if it would be the prince who suffered the consequences.
“Whenever the BBC and the royals meet, someone always gets fired,” she said. “I didn’t think it would be him.” Maitlis added that she wasn’t trying to harm the prince. “He lost a lot from doing that interview,” she said. “My intention was not to ruin his life. That was not on my radar.”
In the documentary, she and her producer on the interview, Sam McAlister, offered a few reasons why Andrew might have been interested in sitting down with the BBC in the first place. “The difficulty of being royal is that you don’t get that right of reply,” Maitlis said. “You don’t get to tweet out if you don’t like a story.”
To negotiate about the interview, Maitlis and McAlister visited Andrew at home, and Maitlis said that the meeting was joined by Princess Beatrice. They went over a few ideas, and then Andrew said they would get back in touch with a final decision. “He said this curious phrase: ‘I’ve got to seek approval from higher up,’” Maitlis said. “And I realized he was talking about the queen.”
Before the interview, she practiced with another BBC producer, Esme Wren, playing the role of Andrew. Maitlis also explained that preparing for the interview was stressful because she knew she only had one shot. “I knew that I had to do an interview that could hold up in a court of law. Once we knew we had the chance, there couldn’t be a misstep,” Maitlis explained. “I was terrified about everything. I was terrified I’d get the tone wrong and either be too ingratiating or too rude.”
Afterward, McAlister said both Andrew and his assistant Amanda Thirsk thought the interview had gone well. Maitlis explained that the BBC team left the palace that day feeling anxious. “We crammed into a taxi and we were all eyeballing each other. We didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry,” she said. “We had got an interview the likes of which had never been seen before.”
Since the interview aired in 2019, Maitlis has left the BBC and is now a host of The News Agents on LBC Radio. McAlister wrote, Scoops: Inside the BBC’s Most Shocking Interviews from Prince Andrew to Steven Seagal, a memoir about her time at the broadcaster in the runup to the Andrew interview. Last year, the memoir was optioned by Netflix, and Rufus Sewell and Gillian Anderson are set to play Andrew and Maitlis respectively.
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