When Gillian Anderson was approached to play famed BBC journalist Emily Maitlis in the new Netflix film “Scoop,” the two-time Emmy Award winner was reticent to take the part.
“I like to do things that are scary on the one hand, but on the other hand, given her proximity to me and my life and the world here in the United Kingdom, it felt like it was almost too close to home,” Anderson tells Gold Derby in an exclusive video interview from her home country of Britain. But after meeting over Zoom with “Scoop” director Philip Martin (“The Crown”) and screenwriter Peter Moffat (“Your Honor”), Anderson realized her apprehension about the role was a feature, not a bug.
“As I was explaining to them, why I wouldn’t be taking the role, they then explained to me why I needed to do it. That I needed to jump in with both feet. And, yeah, it made sense,” Anderson says. “I kind of knew it. It was just a bit daunting.”
Based on the book by former BBC booking producer Sam McAlister, “Scoop” focuses on the infamous 2019 interview Maitlis conducted with Prince Andrew after the royal’s close friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein became public. After their disastrous interview, deemed by many as one of the biggest public relations fiascos in modern history, Prince Andrew stepped back from his public duties. Years later, he was stripped of his titles and also paid a settlement to Virginia Giuffre, the woman who claimed Epstein trafficked her to have sex with his friends – including allegedly Prince Andrew – when she was underage in the United States at the time. (Prince Andrew has repeatedly denied Giuffre’s claims.) The film culminates with a recreation of the interview, with Anderson and costar Rufus Sewell as Prince Andrew capturing the real mannerisms and speech patterns of their real-life counterparts down to the breath.
“It felt like I was hearing this stuff for the first time, which I was from Rufus, but at the same time, I knew what was coming next,” she recalls of the sequence. “It was a very curious situation.”
Obviously, Anderson was aware of the Prince Andrew interview before joining “Scoop.” But what she only realized by playing Mailtis is the tightrope walk the BBC Newsnight journalist had to walk during the interview itself. “It was fascinating to watch, what one can only imagine is, a technique, a masterclass in how to interview a potentially difficult subject,” she says. “It was certainly, for the BBC over here, having that opportunity was so rare.”
Anderson is no stranger to playing real-life characters. She won her second Emmy Award at the 2021 ceremony for playing Margaret Thatcher in “The Crown” and recently played Eleanor Roosevelt in “The First Lady.”
“I think I have learned that it’s always good to kind of split the difference a little bit, to keep a little bit of myself in there,” she says of playing real people like Maitlis. “It’s not always good to try and be so obsessed with doing it perfectly and therein lies a bit of freedom and spontaneity in a way. But by the same token, I did study Emily. I did study how she moved and how she spoke, how she held her head and all that stuff that that one does when playing real-life character. And so I guess the balance comes on any given day, in terms of the particular scene, and where those mannerisms end up showing up the most.”
But Anderson also knows that sometimes the hair and makeup and wardrobe for a character can go a long way toward selling the audience on a transformation too.
“You can rely on that to fill in a bit of the story. You know, someone I know joked at one point, about Margaret Thatcher and the fact that given the costumes and the body suit and the hair, her profile was so quintessentially her that even if I hadn’t shown up and worked on the voice at all, people would still know it was her,” she says.
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