Michael Sheen Reveals Why He Would Never Want to Be a Member of the Royal Family (Exclusive)

Mar. 15, 2025

Michael Sheen as Prince Andrew in ‘A Very Royal Scandal’.Photo:Amazon Prime Video/Youtube

Amazon Prime Video/Youtube

When preparing to portrayPrince Andrewin Prime Video’sA Very Royal Scandal, actorMichael Sheenfound one particular quirk in the royal’s mannerisms that stood out during his research.

A Very Royal Scandal, which explores the events leading up to and following the infamous 2019 BBCNewsnightinterview with Emily Maitlis that effectively ended Prince Andrew’s royal career, is not Michael Sheen’s first time portraying a real-life figure. Known for his role as journalist David Frost in 2008’sFrost/Nixon, Sheen has also twice played former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair — in 2010’sThe Special Relationshipand 2006’sThe Queen, which focused on Andrew’s mother, Queen Elizabeth. However, when it came to embodying Prince Andrew for Amazon’s three-part series, it was the Duke’s distinctive laugh that stood out to Sheen.

“In the research, when I’m looking at all the footage and interviews, I’m waiting for something to kind of jump up and grab me,” Sheen tells PEOPLE ahead of the show’s Sept. 19 release. “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 realize that you’ve already found that moment and you go back to it. But there’s always something.”

Michael Sheen as Prince Andrew in ‘A Very Royal Scandal’.Amazon

Amazon

That moment of revelation for Sheen came while watching an interview Prince Andrew gave “maybe 15 years ago,” he recalls. In the interview, Andrew is asked whether he had any advice forPrince William, likely regarding military service. Andrew, who served in a different branch of the armed forces than William, makes a joke about the rivalry between the services. “He says, ‘I should have said you should be in the Navy,’ and then he laughs, and the laugh he does is so startling. 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.”

It was jarring, Sheen explains, because, “For the royal family, who are usually so controlled, trying to keep things very much under the surface, it was a moment of startling, shocking emotion — even if it was just a laugh. But there was something about it that I thought was quite telling, so that stayed with me.”

A physical feature stood out, too. “He has quite prominent teeth,” Sheen says of Prince Andrew. “He’s quite toothy. So the combination of the relish of this kind of joke that he’d made and then those teeth — it was quite shocking.”

Prince Andrew, Duke of York at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, to attend the Easter Mattins Service, on March 31, 2024.JUSTIN TALLIS/AFP/Getty

JUSTIN TALLIS/AFP/Getty

Sheen has now played a royal, but would he want to be a royal? “Absolutely not,” he tells PEOPLE. “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.”

Playing Prince Andrew gave Sheen not only into what it must be like to be a royal but also about the institution of the monarchy itself, he says.

“I’d always quite naively imagined that the media and the royal family were quite separate institutions,” he tells PEOPLE. “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.’ You know, it’s a real — there are deals being done all the time between the two institutions, which I found fascinating, and I didn’t realize that. That was a big surprise.”

Sheen explains that when it comes to portraying characters, especially someone like Prince Andrew, he tries to tap into what’s going on beneath the surface.

“What makes this person tick?” Sheen says of how he prepared to play a person very much still in the headlines, even after Andrew’s role as a working royal ended. “What are the things that they want? And what do they think is stopping them from getting what they want?”

He adds, “If you don’t have that, if it’s just the surface stuff and the tics and the physical things. An audience might enjoy that for a couple of minutes, but you can’t tolerate that for a three-hour series. There has to be something more substantial.”

Prince Andrew the Duke of York on board HMS Invincible during the Falklands War, in which he served as a helicopter pilot.Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty

Sheen says that “he comes back and there’s that footage of him dockside when he comes off the boat. And there are thousands upon thousands of people just cheering and shouting, and he looks so attractive and sexy and, you know, handsome. And he’s there in his uniform and he’s the most eligible bachelor, and he’s a prince. It’s like the absolute height of everything. And to think about how since that moment, his life could be perceived as being a sort of downward trajectory where he gets older, he puts on weight, he loses his looks a bit. He gets further and further away from the center of power of being what’s known as the ‘spare.’ The brother who’s never going to be king. As[King] Charleshas children and he gets further and further away, and all those things that must have given him a sense of his worth and value and pride, all those things ebb away. So it was that footage of him coming back [that] had a huge impact on me.”

Ruth Wilson as Emily Maitlis and Michael Sheen as Prince Andrew in ‘A Very Royal Scandal’.Amazon

Soon after theNewsnightinterview aired, Prince Andrew announced he wasstepping back from public duties, and in January 2022, Queen Elizabeth stripped him of his military titles and patronages amid Guiffre’s civil sexual assault lawsuit that has since been settled. Prince Andrew has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.

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When it comes to Sheen and the royal family, the actor took a decisive step away from the institution in his own life: in 2017, eight years after receiving a Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to drama from Queen Elizabeth in 2009, the Welsh actor quietly handed back the award after looking into the history of the relationship between England and Wales for the 2017 Raymond Williams Society lecture,PEOPLE previously reported.

Despite feeling “incredibly honored” at receiving the award, Sheen expressed discomfort with practices such as handing the Prince of Wales title to an English-born heir to the throne — a tradition started in 1301 when King Edward I gave his son the title of Prince of Wales to subdue a Welsh rebellion. “These things have power,” Sheen said.

In 2017, when Sheen returned the award, King Charles was still Prince of Wales; in 2022, following the death of Queen Elizabeth, the title passed to his eldest son, Prince William, who holds it today.

source: people.com