Sewell, Rufus

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    Rufus Sewell Plays a Gasping Prince Andrew in ‘Scoop’

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    In the feature “Scoop,” streaming on Netflix, Rufus Sewell plays the disgraced royal blundering through a 2019 BBC interview.Before filming started on “Scoop,” a Netflix feature about Prince Andrew’s notoriously misjudged 2019 interview on the BBC, the actor Rufus Sewell, who stars as the disgraced royal, turned up on set to shoot a few photographs that would appear in the background. Loaded with makeup and prosthetics, including false teeth and a feathery wig, Sewell felt leaden and self-conscious, he said, fearful that his impersonation would slip into parody.Then, he recalled, he sat down opposite an elderly man working as an extra. Had they worked together before, the man asked Sewell; he looked vaguely familiar. “No,” Sewell told him, “but obviously I wouldn’t have looked like this.” The man seemed confused, and was even more bewildered when Sewell explained, “This isn’t my real face.” The extra laughed: “What do you mean it’s not your face?”This interaction, though strange, was very helpful, Sewell said in a recent video interview. “I realized that it wasn’t about passing for Andrew,” he added. Instead, the man “hadn’t doubted for a second that I was a human — that I was a real person,” Sewell said. “That gave me a real freedom and a lease on life.”The right way of playing Prince Andrew, Sewell said, was in “the uncanny valley between me and him.”Eamonn M. Mccormack/Getty ImagesSewell’s performance as Prince Andrew, who is also known as the Duke of York, is impressive, not so much because of the resemblance (which is, at times, striking), but because he slyly channels the spirit of the man who so horrified the British public by seeming to justify his friendship with the financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.Sewell avoids the typical pitfalls of playing a real person as a broad, exaggerated impersonation. His duke is a spasm of nervous tics and shifty glances, of unctuous charm and feigned candor. Watching the journalist Emily Maitlis (an excellent Gillian Anderson) walk in to conduct the interview wearing pants, he gawks at her and shouts, “Trousers!” It feels true to the Prince Andrew the public knows, however little viewers may not believe what the character says.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The Diplomat’ Review: Save the Marriage, Save the World

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      Keri Russell stars in a Netflix political thriller that doubles as a high-style romantic comedy.Debora Cahn most recently served as an executive producer and writer on “Homeland.” Keri Russell most famously played a hyper-efficient assassin on “The Americans.” Their collaboration in the new Netflix series “The Diplomat” — Cahn created it, Russell stars — would lead you to expect something dark, violent and complicated.But a look further back in Cahn’s history shows that she started her career with a long run as a writer and producer on “The West Wing.” And that’s the spirit she’s brought to “The Diplomat,” a political thriller laced with romance and written, with some success, in an Aaron Sorkinesque high-comic, high-velocity style.So you would be right about complicated, at least. Geopolitical crises and amorous complications are thick on the ground, intertwining and constantly morphing in ways that can be hard to follow. (The serial twists and breathless explanations both contribute to and help to obscure the plot-greasing implausibilities necessary for a show that puts earthshaking events in a comic framework.)Russell plays Kate Wyler, a career American diplomat suddenly and surprisingly named ambassador to Britain. She arrives in London with her trailing spouse, Hal (Rufus Sewell), a more experienced and renowned diplomat who is now expected to smile for the cameras but otherwise keep his mouth shut. For them, artifice is an essential element in both statecraft and marriage.Kate and Hal’s union is on its last legs, as it turns out. But thanks to an improbable, possibly MacGuffinish twist, it is mandatory that they stay together. So one pole of the plot is their highly cultivated Bickersons act, a will-they-or-won’t-they screwball anti-romance between an unforgiving woman and a roguish, egomaniacal man; you may see ghostly images of Carole Lombard and John Barrymore. At the same time, Hal, along with Kate’s fiercely competent deputy, Stuart (Ato Essandoh), is tasked with turning the combative Kate into a more refined diplomat, an arduous process with echoes of “My Fair Lady” and “Kiss Me, Kate.”The rom-com complications — they also encompass Kate’s attraction to the British foreign minister (David Gyasi) and a classic secondary romance between Stuart and the C.I.A. station chief (Ali Ahn) — and the political machinations bounce off and intensify one another, in the old “West Wing” style. An attack on a British warship in the Middle East starts an eight-episode chain of events involving Iran and Russia that has Kate shuttling between the American president (Michael McKean) and the British prime minister (Rory Kinnear, who stands out in an excellent cast) and, with Hal’s help, salvaging U.S.-U.K. relations while pretty much literally saving the world.“The Diplomat” is concerned with the dynamics of the international order, the proper balance between idealism and realpolitik, and the fallout of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but it’s essentially a show about a marriage. The conceit of Kate as the undiplomatic diplomat — a woman whose stone-cold, steel-trap strategic abilities would be considered suitable for the Court of St. James’s — is, to put it kindly, absurd, but its main purpose is to set up the contrast with the smoother, more devious, more obviously diplomatic Hal.And you can see how Russell’s coldblooded excellence in “The Americans” would recommend her for the part of Kate. (In an amusing nod to Russell’s long run as the murderous Elizabeth Jennings, Kate is asked whether she poisoned a fellow diplomat and deadpans, “Not my style.”) But while she’s perfectly proficient, and has no trouble conveying the character’s intelligence and, when called for, her uncertainty or anger, Russell is not as funny as the show needs her to be. Relaxing into the role and giving the emotional connections the casual, spontaneous feel that the rom-com structure calls for are not her strengths.Luckily for “The Diplomat,” Sewell has no trouble getting in touch with his inner Barrymore, and he walks away with the show. Hal is petulant, childish and arrogant, but he’s smart and charming enough to get away with it, and Sewell both embodies the charm and shows us the flashes of doubt and nobility that redeem him. Making an over-scaled, too-good-to-be-true romantic construction like Hal feel absolutely real is a trick right up there with saving the world from global war. More