Prince Andrew actor outlines key reason why he would never want to be part of the Royal Family
The actor playing Prince Andrew in the upcoming Amazon Prime series A Very Royal Scandal has detailed how he would “absolutely” never want to be part of the Royal Family.
Stage and screen veteran Michael Sheen, slated to portray the Duke of York in the streaming giant’s latest mini-series, opened up on his preparation for the controversy-mired role – as well as how he would deal with being part of The Firm.
Sheen, 55, told People magazine about how he picked up on a number of the prince’s affectations and mannerisms as he geared up to star as Andrew in the second adaptation of his infamous 2019 BBC Newsnight interview with Emily Maitlis after Netflix’s Scoop – also released this year.
The four-time Bafta nominee detailed how, when researching his roles, he waits “for something to kind of jump up and grab me”
He continued: “In every character that I’ve played, eventually something just kind of catches you and you go: ‘Oh,’ and sometimes it takes a little while before you realise that you’ve already found that moment and you go back to it… But there’s always something.”
For the disgraced Duke of York, that moment came from an interview “maybe 15 years ago” in which Andrew jokingly gave Prince William some advice on which branch of the armed forces to join.
Regarding that moment, Sheen highlighted how Andrew says: “‘I should have said you should be in the Navy,’ and then he laughs, and the laugh he does is so startling”.
The actor added: “It was sort of extraordinary… I’d never seen that before – it was an exposed moment in a way. And that really stuck with me.
He called Andrew’s rare moment of emotion “shocking” and “startling” – especially since the royals are “usually so controlled” and “trying to keep things very much under the surface”.
But when probed on whether he would want to be a royal, Sheen replied: “Absolutely not.”
He said: “No. The fairytale image of it seems so extraordinary – living in palaces and having everything you want and servants and all that kind of stuff.
“But the reality seems to be that there are far more restrictions than there are freedoms. No amount of wealth or assets or privilege can make up for not being able to have basic sort of freedoms that a lot of us take for granted.
“So, no – I would not want to have that life.
The Newport-born star added that playing the prince in the damning Newsnight interview gave him a fresh perspective on the monarchy and media outlets like the BBC.
He said: “I’d always quite naively imagined that the media and the royal family were quite separate institutions.
“But then it became clear that there’s all these sort of negotiations that go on between them, and there’s a kind of, you know, ‘Well, if you do this, then we’ll do that… And if you give us this interview, we’ll hide this thing’.
“There are deals being done all the time between the two institutions, which I found fascinating, and I didn’t realise that. That was a big surprise.
