At first, Gillian Anderson couldn’t bring herself to watch Prince Andrew’s disastrous 2019 BBC Newsnight interview with Emily Maitlis—the one where the disgraced royal denied having sex with a teenage girl, offered a PizzaExpress alibi, and then claimed that he could not sweat because of an adrenaline overdose in the Falklands War. The interview, which only fanned the flames of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal that the royal had meant to stomp out, was dubbed “one of the single worst PR moves in recent history” by a palace insider.

Given the negative hype, Anderson admits, “I came to it late, because I knew that it was going to be cringeworthy. For a while I didn’t want to subject myself to that.”

Several years after the uncomfortable BBC showdown aired, though, Anderson found herself watching it on loop while preparing to play Maitlis in Netflix’s forthcoming film Scoop. A longtime listener of Maitlis’s podcast The News Agents, Anderson is accustomed to hearing the journalist act “quite ruthless” with her interview subjects. “She doesn’t let anybody off the hook, particularly powerful people who are trying to avoid answering questions,” says Anderson during a recent Zoom with VF. 

Rewatching the interview, though, Anderson says, “I was struck by how gentle she was. If she asked too strong a question or pressed it too hard, it’d be done. He could have stopped.” Maitlis’s strategy worked: Prince Andrew engaged the journalist on every subject she threw at him, to disastrous effect.

The film is based on former Newsnight producer Sam McAlister’s book Scoops: Behind the Scenes of the BBC’s Most Shocking Interviews. Directed by Philip Martin, the drama tracks how McAlister (Billie Piper) secured the historic interview and how Maitlis prepared for the conversation with her Newsnight team, as well as the sit-down with Prince Andrew (Rufus Sewell) itself. Though the behind-the-scenes story of an interview doesn’t sound like tantalizing programming, the stakes for both parties give Scoop a surprising tick-tock suspense. Andrew is attempting to quiet the surging scandal around his friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. On the flip side, the BBC is looking for a ratings win—and Maitlis also feels that she needs to professionally redeem herself by asking Andrew the hard questions she felt she failed to ask Bill Clinton in a 2019 interview. (The journalist has spoken about regretting that she did not take the opportunity to grill him about Monica Lewinsky.)

The real Maitlis has said that she was incredibly stressed in the lead-up to the sit-down because she knew she only had one shot, and previous royal interviews had typically gone badly for the network. “Whenever the BBC and the royals meet, someone always gets fired,” Maitlis said last year. Speaking about the pressure, she added, “There couldn’t be a misstep. I was terrified about everything. I was terrified I’d get the tone wrong and either be too ingratiating or too rude.”

Even Maitlis’s wardrobe—a military-style jacket and pants—required consideration. Explains Anderson, “I don’t know how much you know of Emily Maitlis, but she likes a short skirt, and she’s got the legs for a short skirt. So with pants, she wanted [Prince Andrew] to focus.” As for the military jacket, the newscaster was sitting down with someone who spent 22 years in the royal navy. Maybe, says Anderson, Maitlis thought about “whether he would feel more comfortable with her, that she was on [his] side, subliminally.”

The film illustrates how intimidating it was for Maitlis to walk into Buckingham Palace to interview the prince on his home turf. Anderson had a similarly daunting experience when she arrived on the palace set to debut her take on the real-life character in her first scene: Scoop’s recreation of the Newsnight interview. It was the first time she saw Sewell made up in four hours’ worth of makeup that gave the straightedge actor an everyman bloat. “I think I screeched—like, ‘What?!’” says Anderson, laughing. 

Individually, Anderson and Sewell had memorized the 10 minutes of the 60-minute interview that they were recreating—obsessively getting each pause, minute gesture, and misdirection—but weren’t sure how the other had prepared. The second that cameras started rolling, though, the actors found themselves in sync. “The rhythms were the same,” marvels Anderson. “It was almost surreal, because we’ve never done that before. I’ve only [done it] in my head, and maybe out loud on the treadmill. It was exhilarating. Everything about what [he] gave me was absolutely spot on, in terms of tripping up on a word, looking up, trying to think, trying to backtrack, all that. He got it.”

Because Maitlis comes to act as the audience avatar during the interview, there’s a triumphant feeling when the conversation is over—a credit to the journalist, who earned the Royal Television Society’s 2020 “news presenter of the year” award for her work questioning Prince Andrew in the royal’s first public conversation since Epstein was arrested on federal charges of sex trafficking minors. And now, Maitlis’s career highlight is being adapted into the film, which will begin streaming on Netflix Friday. 

Anderson did not speak to Maitlis while preparing for the role, as the journalist preferred to keep her distance from the project. “I think Gillian is just a fantastic actress and I think she’s amazing, so I’m very happy to be completely hands-off and just allow her space to do something fabulous,” Maitlis said last year. During her conversation with VF, Anderson repays the compliment: “She’s amazing—incredibly intelligent and fast on her feet. I have such respect for anyone who is live on air, rolls with the punches, and continues to stay on top of what’s been said, what needs to be said, what you’re trying to get said, and keep filling, filling, filling…I’d be so bad at it.”

Maitlis is one in a long list of accomplished women Anderson has played throughout her three-decade career—characters successful in politics (Margaret Thatcher in The Crown, Eleanor Roosevelt in The First Lady), crime (Stella Gibson in The Fall), sex therapy (Jean Milburn in Sex Education), and the paranormal (Dana Scully in The X-Files). Has Anderson always felt the confidence her characters carry so easily?

“I have not, by any stretch,” she replies. “There’ve been plenty of times, starting from when I was in my 20s on The X-Files, feeling like an imposter—[playing a character] pretty high up and heard in her field, being in control of other task forces, being 24, feeling like I had a squeaky voice and ‘how on earth am I going to make it look like I have authority in front of them?’”

She points out that each of these characters, no matter how assured or accomplished, has had her own limitations. “Even later on with characters like Stella Gibson in The Fall, I don’t think any of them are perfect human beings. They all have flaws. Whether that’s around morality or self-esteem or hubris with Thatcher, there’s always something that humanizes them.”

“And yes, many of them are at the top of their fields,” she admits of the women she’s played, “and have pushed through barriers to get there. That certainly must be something that I’m attracted to, or at least that people think that I could play. But I think part of what I enjoy, and this was even the case with The Crown scripts and Thatcher, is trying to turn these women into proper, three-dimensional human beings, where they don’t necessarily have it all together all of the time. I think that, as much as anything, is important for women to see.”