It’s lunchtime on the day of Scoop’s London premiere, and the corridors of the Langham hotel are abuzz with activity. There’s Rufus Sewell in the corner, weighing up his outfit options for the evening (“I feel like sometimes you can wear something pink… but not today?” I later saw that he wore head-to-toe black); Keeley Hawes, who runs over from the other end to hug a publicist; and later Sam McAlister, the former booker of Newsnight and the new Netflix film’s executive producer, who penned the book on which it’s based, Scoops: The BBC’s Most Shocking Interviews From Steven Seagal to Prince Andrew.
Conspicuous in her absence is Billie Piper, who dons giant sunglasses and leather trousers to play McAlister in the forthcoming release—a behind-the-scenes look at how the decade’s most explosive royal interview was secured, from director Philip Martin and writer Peter Moffat—opposite Sewell’s Prince Andrew and Hawes as the Duke of York’s private secretary, Amanda Thirsk. So too is the woman I’m here to speak to today: Gillian Anderson, who puts on her military jacket and perfects her very precise bob before going into battle with her interviewee as the formidable Emily Maitlis.
Then, suddenly, Anderson’s arrived—surprisingly petite and shivering from the chill in the room we’re due to speak in, so much so that she pulls out a terry-cloth robe from the wardrobe and puts it on over her silk shirt. We’ve met before, but in the course of our conversation, I notice something subtly different in the way she bends her head and in the slight curve of her lips—shades of Maitlis, as if the character still hasn’t fully left Anderson’s body.
In Scoop, there is something almost eerie about the actor’s embodiment of her. The distinctive voice, her expressions, the way she moves her hands—all familiar to audiences who’ve watched her on the BBC for over a decade—are replicated with immense precision. McAlister is the story’s undisputed lead, liaising with Thirsk to persuade Prince Andrew to commit to the interview, but Maitlis comes a close second. Slinking around the BBC offices with her pet whippet Moody in tow, she’s a force of nature who is determined to hold the Duke to account.
She throws herself into preparations and, on the big day itself, keeps her cool, cutting through the Prince’s bluster with ease to get to the truth of the matter, and leaving him utterly exposed in the process. Throughout, it’s clear that she feels an enormous sense of responsibility to get the interview exactly right. If they don’t, her editor Esme Wren (Romola Garai) tells them, it’s not the Duke, but the BBC that’ll be the story. “No,” Maitlis replies. “It’ll be me.”
She’s masterful but, then again, we’ve come to expect nothing less from Anderson. The 55-year-old American-born, partly London-raised screen legend has always thrown everything into the characters she plays—from The X-Files’s Dana Scully to The Fall’s Stella Gibson, Sex Education’s Jean Milburn to The Crown’s Margaret Thatcher—and collected four SAG Awards, two Emmys and two Golden Globes along the way.
As we await Scoop’s release on April 5, Anderson tells us why she initially turned down the role of Maitlis, how she recently ran into the real Maitlis in Hyde Park, and her upcoming book, which compiles over 100 anonymous letters from women discussing their most intimate sexual fantasies.
Vogue: I read that you initially avoided watching the Newsnight interview because you heard it was such a car crash. When did you finally get around to watching it?
Gillian Anderson: I actually can’t remember whether I watched it within a certain period of it airing, or whether it was after I’d agreed to do Scoop. Once I’d signed on, I thought, Right, I’ve seen clips, but I actually need to commit some time to watching it. And when I did… the conversation they have, it feels like the two of them are almost speaking two different languages? There’s such a disconnect. And it makes you ask questions like: why would someone put themselves in that position? How did that even happen? And that’s what our film is about—it’s about the women who were involved in making this happen.
I know you turned down the role at first, because it felt too tricky. What made you change your mind?
It was the script. I didn’t want to turn it down because I liked the script so much, but at the same time, it felt like, why subject myself to potential punishment? [Laughs.] But then, I was Zooming with Peter Moffat, the writer, and Philip Martin, the director, and I was giving them all the reasons why I shouldn’t do it. And they said, “Well, you know that means you have to do it, right? Because it’s so potentially scary.”
What did you learn from the script about the behind-the-scenes story that you didn’t know before?
Initially, it was the fact of how many people it takes in order to secure interviews. I also found the rehearsal process for the interview fascinating. I don’t know if that’s part of the process outside of a scenario like this, where it’s such a big deal, but, in Sam’s telling of it, it seemed important to understand who Prince Andrew was, how he’s likely to respond to certain types of questions, and how to not make him run away. They had to appeal to him and make him feel at ease, or at least make him feel that he didn’t need to be frightened of Emily or afraid of the process. It’s a very delicate dance. And planning the structure of the interview—part of the joy of the drama is seeing the degree to which Emily follows that or doesn’t, at the end of the day, and the consequences of that.
Can you also talk to me about perfecting her voice, mannerisms, and physicality?
So I read Emily’s memoir about what it’s like to do her job, but I also listened to it, because she reads the audiobook. She’s very self-deprecating and funny. I also studied interviews she’d done on YouTube. There’s so much footage out there. It’s also really interesting to watch what she does in an interview while the other person is talking. And, obviously, that’s specifically interesting in this interview. I felt like this with Thatcher too—a six-part BBC documentary came out, by the grace of God, right when I was doing my research to play her, and there were some moments when she was preparing for a speech. The camera was on her, but I don’t think she knew that it was rolling yet. So, you see her unguarded and it’s not performative. She’s so used to being in the public eye, but that was just one of those moments that I find the most interesting.
That very precise bob and the military jacket also helped your transformation into Emily. What are the details in that costuming that are worth looking out for?
So, Emily has a few military jackets—it’s part of her look and something she seems to like. She’s got two, maybe even three of varying lengths. And so one would automatically assume that she’d choose one for this interview because it’s appropriate, because it’s Andrew and he was in the British Navy and so on. But to me, the interesting thing was how buttoned up it was, all the way up to under the neck. So, how much of that is armor? Also, the choice to wear trousers when she is wearing quite short skirts so much of the time. We see a lot of leg in her interviews, so you know she’s confident there. All those little things were very telling.
I also love how she uses her pen—it’s very precise, almost like a scalpel that cuts through the bluster.
She always has it resting, and it’s in this very particular way. I don’t know whether it just felt strange to me because it was in my left hand and I’m right handed, but… she’s quite confident with it and she’s used to having it. It’s pretty much there in every sit-down interview.
What was it like filming that interview scene opposite Rufus, who is so unsettling in this role?
It was one of the first things we filmed. By that point, I’d studied that interview so much. I listened to it over and over, and I had a shortened version of it which was the 10 minutes [in the film] that I edited down to an MP3 and a video. I watched his side, but I was mostly listening to the beginning and the end [of what he said] because those were my cues. So, when I sat across from Rufus and the cameras were rolling, on one hand, my brain knows this is when she looked down and looked up and this is when her hand moves and she refers to her notes, but at the same time, I was watching Rufus and thinking, Oh my God, he’s amazing. It was almost like a dance. That was the first time we were sat in front of each other because we never rehearsed it. It was really surreal.
Having studied the interview so much, what do you think the key was to Emily’s success?
I found it interesting, the degree to which she’s gentle at the beginning. She’s often not—she’s quite terrifying in some of her interviews, but then some of her questions are actually quite tough. She doesn’t let him off the hook. She asked the same questions a couple of times in different ways. She pulls him up on things and she lets him hang himself, so to speak, on certain things. I’d imagine it would have been really hard to not respond to some of those things that he said in real time. She just trusted that we’d see those things for what they were. And then it wouldn’t seem like she manipulated the situation or tried to make him flustered by asking too many questions. She just asked the questions. And there’s a definite brilliance in that.
Like when he talks about his “straightforward shooting weekend” with Jeffrey Epstein and she just doesn’t react.
It’s probably one of my favorite lines. [Laughs.] She locks eyes with him but she’s not fazed. She’s like, “Right.”
The film also gives us a sense of what’s motivating Emily, because she says at one point that she has regrets about a previous interview in which she didn’t ask Bill Clinton about Monica Lewinsky, and felt like she let women down as a result. Was that in her memoir?
It was—I think that interview with Clinton was in India, and he was there with a charitable organization that works specifically to support women. So it was a double whammy. I’ve been in his presence and it’s unbelievably daunting. I can understand how frustrating that would have been. Regardless of the degree to which that was the motivation for this interview, there’s no doubt that it was somewhere in there. It was particularly important in this case, given all the young women involved, that she ask questions on their behalf for the sake of the truth. That’s why independent public service journalism is so important to society.
The film is a real testament to its importance. What do you hope viewers leave it with?
I really like the film and, you know, one doesn’t always get to say that. [Laughs.] The meat and musculature of the script makes it quite unique—it feels modern and propulsive, like a proper thriller. Even though we all know this story inside out, and I know the story behind the scenes inside out, too, when I was watching it, it was tense. I was thinking, “Are they going to lose this?” That’s good filmmaking.
I know you didn’t meet Emily before filming because she’s working on her own retelling of this story, but I heard that you did run into her recently?
It’s actually happened on a couple of occasions. The first time we met, people introduced us and I was overly familiar because, of course, I knew her inside and out, and to her I was a complete stranger. So that was weird and I’m sure a little bit creepy. The second time, I actually saw her in Hyde Park. I was walking my dog, and there’s this bin we stop at where my dog knows to sit before I take off her lead and she runs for me to throw her a ball. And I bent down, and this woman moved between me and the bin and this dog moved between us. All of a sudden my brain just went “Moody!” And that’s when I looked up and saw her, and I almost said, “Hey! I just saw our film!” I’d literally seen it the night before. As if it was our film. [Laughs.] Thankfully, something stopped me. I just stood there.
The whippet in the film is great, it has to be said. Did you get to bond?
That dog only bonds with its owner. It was in a very codependent relationship with its owner, which made that challenging. [Laughs.] But it was great fun to wander through the halls of the BBC together.
Finally, I’d love to ask you about your book, Want, which compiles anonymous letters from hundreds of women which discuss their sexual desires. What made you want to put it together, and what did you learn from the process about what we as women are able and unable to ask for?
Initially, the book was an attempt to do a kind of modern-day version of Nancy Friday’s 1973 book My Secret Garden, where she asked women to write anonymous letters about their fantasies and send them to her. She waded through them all and chose certain ones to include. I wanted to look at the degree to which things might have changed after the sexual revolution, the rise of pornography, and all of the things that we see on television today, including shows like Sex Education. In all these different mediums, we can have a very different conversation about sex out in the public now, compared to back then.
It was important that we figured out a way to create a portal so that women could write in and feel safe that their letter was totally anonymous. And it was important that it was multicultural and multinational. We got 800 letters and we ended up with about 174. It was a lot of editing but I really enjoyed that process of choosing which letters would follow which. There are so many ways in which things haven’t changed. There’s still shame and guilt and women really struggling to ask for what they want in relationships, and even having those conversations with their partners. I found that both surprising and not surprising. It was fascinating.
Scoop is on Netflix from April 5. Want by Gillian Anderson is out on September 17.