Emily Maitlis Was 'Quite Scared’ When Prince Andrew Quit Royal Duty After Her 2019 “Newsnight” Interview (Exclusive)

"This has now got a life and lease of its own," Maitlis tells PEOPLE of the interview's aftermath, which plays out in the new series "A Very Royal Scandal"

Millions watched the disastrous 2019 BBC Newsnight interview between Prince Andrew and veteran journalist Emily Maitlis — but only one person sat across from the Duke of York as it was taking place.

The interview, which ended Prince Andrew’s career as a working royal, is the subject of the new Prime Video series A Very Royal Scandal, out Sept. 19. During the interview itself nearly five years ago, “My heart started beating really fast,” Maitlis tells PEOPLE.

The new three-part series explores the lead-up to, aftermath of, and the actual interview between Maitlis and Prince Andrew. It delves into his connections with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and addresses the allegations made by Virginia Giuffre, who accused Andrew of having sexual relations with her when she was 17. Soon after the Newsnight interview aired, Prince Andrew announced he was stepping 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.

After Andrew’s resignation from royal life, which happened within days of the interview airing, “I think for a moment I was quite scared,” Maitlis tells PEOPLE of her immediate reaction and how it underscored the true power of journalism.

She adds, “On the one hand, you have this extraordinary power as a journalist. You can literally rewrite the chapters of a royal prince’s life in that interview.”

“You put something in motion with an interview like that which you cannot control, and I guess I felt the real power of responsibility,” she says. “What happened if he went over the edge? What happened if he was thrown out by his family? I didn't know. I felt that things had started turning on their own and it was not me anymore. I couldn’t touch that. It was happening of its own accord. And I remember thinking, ‘This is quite scary because this has now got a life and lease of its own.’ And you feel very aware. I was very conscious of the other people in his life — of his own daughters, the family members. I felt that was important.”

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In an early moment in the interview, Maitlis asked the royal if he regretted his friendship with Epstein.

“It would’ve been a really easy thing just to say, ‘In hindsight, my God, I got that wrong.’ And he used this curious phrase. He said, ‘Still not,’” Maitlis says.

As Andrew continued to detail all the contacts he met and the doors that opened for him because of Epstein, “I remember thinking, ‘That’s just a strange response. Do you not realize that everyone’s eyes are on you? We’re watching how you respond to this, and you’re talking about this. He’s a pedophile. He’s an absolute monster,” Maitlis adds, referring to Epstein. “What a normal person would’ve said is, ‘Oh my God, if I’d known then what I know now, it would’ve been very different.’ But instead, he just talked about all the doors he’d opened and all the people that he’d met. And I just remember thinking, ‘You live in a different world.’”

Even as the interview unfolded, Maitlis had to come to grips with the reality that, when it comes to being a so-called “normal person,” as Maitlis tells PEOPLE, “in a way, he’s not,” she says. “Because he’s a prince, and that’s something that the British public have got to sort of come to terms with. Are we treating him like a prince who lives in a gilded cage, which he is, or are we treating him like a normal member of the public, which he isn’t.”

Maitlis says another exchange during the interview reminded her that he wasn’t a normal member of the public: when she “asked him about the party that he threw for Ghislaine Maxwell and he said, ‘No, no, no, no, no. It was just a straightforward shooting weekend.’” She continues, “It’s the privilege of an incredibly rare, tiny percentage of the aristocracy or the upper classes. And so for him to say it was just a straightforward shooting weekend, I was like, ‘You are on a different planet again. You know you are.’ And I, in a way, had to modify what I was thinking because I was thinking, ‘Well, don’t be outraged because he’s a prince.’ He is a prince. He’s lived in a palace. He’s been surrounded by people who pick up his socks and tie his shoelaces and tuck his napkin in. You know, of course, he’s not a normal person. And so you have to weigh both those things in your hand. I’ve [had] hundreds of accountability interviews with politicians, with elected officials, with people who’ve been at the top of businesses or companies or whatever. This was different. I’d never done an interview with somebody who had been born into that kind of privilege, and of course, it makes it very different.”

Related: Tensions Run High in New Trailer for Prince Andrew Drama A Very Royal Scandal (Exclusive)

As she was going into the interview that November day in 2019, “I said to my editor, ‘How do I do this?’ You know, he’s a prince — do I curtsy, do I say ‘Your Royal Highness’? Do I say ‘Your Highness’ at the end of every sentence? And she just grabbed hold of my wrist, and I think my hand was shaking, and she just looked at me and she said, ‘You’re a journalist. You’re a journalist. You’re not a subject. You’re a journalist.’ And it was a really important thing.”

Of that moment, she adds, “It was a way of saying, ‘Once you go into that interview, your muscle memory kicks in. You cannot be subservient. You cannot pull your punches. You cannot think, ‘Oh, I’d better not ask about sex — this is a royal.’ Or, ‘I better not ask about, you know, things that might not seem gracious.’ I had one chance, but this was a chance for everyone. Everyone sitting at home, everyone, anyone who had been a victim [to] a monster like Epstein.”

To know how far Andrew's star fell in the interview’s aftermath, one must look back at how high he once was. “It’s the size of a man who was a prince shrinking before your eyes,” Maitlis says. “This was a man who came back from the Falklands War with a rose in his teeth. He was a hero. He was adored. He was screamed at by fans. He was a [George] Clooney. He was a [Brad] Pitt. He was somebody that people just thought, ‘We want to know all about you — these are your girlfriends. You’re on the front of the tabloids.’ And it’s the story of, I guess, what that means when you lose everything.”

Maitlis is an executive producer on A Very Royal Scandal, and she worked with Ruth Wilson, who portrays her in the series, on developing the character of Emily Maitlis — even giving Wilson the military-style jacket she wore to the 2019 Newsnight interview, as well as her handbag. In meeting with Wilson, “she sat down and she said, ‘Do you think he’s guilty? Do you think Prince Andrew’s guilty?’ And it was such a kind of stark question,” Maitlis says. “And I said, ‘Well, I guess we’ve got to define that more. Guilty of what? We will never know what happened with Epstein’s victims. We will never know the full story of Virginia Guiffre and Prince Andrew. We will never have that day in court now. It’s been settled. He paid for it to go away, so we won’t know. But we do know the things that he was guilty of, which is a sustained friendship with Epstein after he knew he was a convicted pedophile. We do know that he was quite flat-footed and sort of lacking in IQ and EQ about the victims and their feelings.”

Of her thoughts on Andrew’s role as a royal now, “I don’t get to decree whether he’s guilty or innocent,” Maitlis says. “I don’t get to decree whether he should be allowed to work or back in, or where he should have Christmas [at Sandringham with the royal family] or what uniform he should wear. Thank God that’s not my job.”

Her job, she says, was to ask the questions. “I had this extraordinary privilege of opportunity to put to him the questions that victims of Epstein wanted raised,” Maitlis says. “In that moment, I get to ask the questions and yeah, you’re at the front of that. You’re at the vanguard of being the woman that asks the questions. Afterward, in real life, it was curious, right? Because on the one hand, I was like, ‘I’ve done Prince Andrew. I can do anyone now.’ And on the other hand, it was like, ‘Oh, I can’t get anyone now.’”

The struggle for Maitlis to book interviews with powerful people, especially powerful men, in the aftermath of the Prince Andrew interview is a storyline played out in A Very Royal Scandal — a situation Maitlis calls a “double whammy”: “You feel like you’re kind of at the peak of your confidence — there’s nobody that you won’t dare ask for an interview,” she says. “But also, you’re kind of stymied because people have seen the interview and they understand what that could involve.”

As involved as she was in the Newsnight interview itself, while serving as executive producer on A Very Royal Scandal, there were still details about it that Maitlis learned, including that the interview almost didn’t happen at all. 

“We all told our stories to [screenwriter] Jeremy Brock, and one crazy thing was that I learnt stuff from the scripts that he wrote that I never knew at the time,” Maitlis tells PEOPLE. “And I didn’t know at the time because my darling colleagues had tried to shield me from some of the ups and downs and the things that went wrong or that were going wrong, because they hadn’t wanted to tell me at the time. And so I’m reading through the script and I was like, ‘Jeremy, did the interview really — did it really get called off? Did it really get pulled?’ I was absolutely shocked, and I didn’t know that.”

She adds, “so the thing I love from A Very Royal Scandal is it’s a really very round account from all these different perspectives that play in. It’s not just me and my memory. It’s everyone’s memory, all kind of feeding into what happened, and everyone’s perspective. And I think that makes it really rich and really complicated.”

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The Newsnight interview aired five years ago on November 16. It has already made its mark in culture — A Very Royal Scandal is but one of the dramatizations of the interview this year alone, following about five months behind Netflix’s film adaptation, Scoop, which came out in April and saw Gillian Anderson portray Maitlis. But how will it make its mark on history?

“The legacy will be that we had one chance to ask the questions, and we didn’t flinch from asking them,” Maitlis tells PEOPLE. “And that seems to me really important, actually, that you go in and do your job. There wasn’t anything special about it. I just went in and did my job and I worked with an incredible, incredible team who made it all happen.”

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