Rufus Sewell On The 'Weirdness' of Playing Prince Andrew
Rufus Sewell transforms into Prince Andrew for new Netflix film Scoop, but it wasn't without its discomfort. He and Keeley Hawes talk to Melissa Nathoo about what they found 'weird'. Report by Nathoom. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
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00:00 Rufus, how weird is it to see your face photoshopped into that notorious picture of Andrew and Virginia?
00:08 They're images that we are so used to seeing. That must be weird for you.
00:13 Well, it's not your face, is it?
00:15 No, no.
00:16 So that's the life's work.
00:17 No, but actually the photo she's talking about is a weird photoshopped mixture of...
00:22 That's disturbing. I mean, that is.
00:25 But actually the thing about me in the makeup is what's weird about it is how unweird it becomes.
00:31 It's one of the strange things about our job is what one day is like astonishing, the next day is like, "That's weird."
00:37 Yeah, it wasn't weird for me to be looking at Rufus like that, you know, after the initial...
00:42 People find it weird...
00:43 It becomes weirder...
00:44 To see this.
00:45 Like this.
00:46 So what's strange is how... I would FaceTime my daughter and she'd say, "Hey, Dad."
00:51 Oh my gosh. That's crazy.
00:53 I'd be paying for the, you know...
00:56 The therapy.
00:57 The therapy bills.
00:58 Has it changed your opinion? You guys having studied it so much and now kind of almost being a part of how it all went down,
01:07 has it changed your opinion of how it went down, either for the better or worse?
01:12 My feeling is, before I accept a role like this, I'd better be pretty sure what I think I'm doing it for.
01:20 Right.
01:21 So you have a strong sense of what the story, I think, needs to be told is.
01:26 And that stays pretty much the same. And you discover things.
01:30 The big surprise was, that I didn't know, is how well he thought it had gone.
01:36 Which is an astonishing thing to take into account.
01:39 Yeah, they all thought the whole team.
01:40 Yeah. Cock a hoop.
01:42 Cock a hoop. High-fiving.
01:43 Even Amanda.
01:44 Yeah.
01:45 Even when I watched it afterwards, I was like, "What was she thinking? Thinking this would be a good idea."
01:49 How and why is what I was left with.
01:53 Yeah, why they thought it was a good idea in the first place. And these are not silly people.
01:58 Amanda Thirsk is a really intelligent woman.
02:02 What, Rufus, for you, was the most uncomfortable bit about playing Andrew?
02:08 You've got to deal with the discomfort very early on. You've got to get that out of the way.
02:12 I mean, the discomfort that I was aware of was Andrew's discomfort in having Gillian Anderson as Emily Maitlis.
02:19 That was day one. It was like, "Okay, there's the missing link."
02:22 But you have to make your own...
02:26 For me, what's fascinating about watching the interview is watching what he thinks he's doing.
02:31 There's something about his acting out certain things, like his real thoughts and his performative thoughts.
02:45 His discoveries in the moment and his things that he's worked out on his own and is pretending to think in front of you in order to create an impression in the viewer.
02:55 You can see his aspiration of what he's trying to achieve. And the discord between that and what we are seeing is something that is fascinating and a mixture of...
03:07 Well, it's many, many things. It's very difficult to talk about this without using a word that in print can seem strange, but you'll know it when you watch it.
03:14 Yeah, even just for you guys talking about it, it must be difficult in a way, right?
03:18 Because it is something that's known the world over, but you have to be kind of unbiased in that way.
03:23 You're dealing with real people.
03:25 Absolutely. You don't want to make a statement that's more black and white than your performance would suggest. You have to be unbiased.
03:30 There's a temptation. You can either be accused of trying to make someone look good or trying to make them look bad.
03:36 And your responsibility is... Sometimes the truth is complex.
03:39 Yeah, I really felt for you.
03:41 I can only speak for myself, but whoever you're playing, for me, you have to have an element of empathy and an understanding why somebody's done or behaved as they have or done whatever it is that they've done.
04:00 And so that's also difficult, isn't it?
04:03 Yeah.
04:04 Because when you watch it, you make judgments.
04:07 Yes.
04:08 Like if you're a human being, you watch it...
04:09 Everyone is very judgmental about elements of things.
04:12 Yes.
04:13 And you have to say, "Rewind, okay, this is a human being. This is someone who is a product of their environment."
04:17 And what people do is they... Life is messy, but as a way of coping with life, we narrativize it.
04:24 And that's not forgiving anybody anything.
04:26 Yeah, but we create a story in which this happened to me and then they did this and whatever.
04:31 Life doesn't work out that way.
04:32 But when you watch Andrew, we all have our versions of it. This is someone who is a strange mixture of guilt and victimhood, innocence, culpability, all of those things, lies, avoidance, truth.
04:50 And you can get that in your average day with most people, but this is like very large versions of those things.
04:55 And you want to represent that, including the bits... I watched a lot of him when he was younger when he could be quite charming and not being afraid of that.
05:04 He was incredibly charismatic.
05:05 And he made me laugh a lot watching footage of him talking to people. He was really charming and disarming and that's him as well.
05:11 And people that we've met who know him, met through this film, are very fond of him.
05:17 Well, I think you've done a phenomenal job with it. And clearly they've got the right people to talk about it as well because you guys have expressed yourselves so well.
05:26 Thank you.
05:27 Thank you so much.
05:28 It's early.