Netflix’s ‘Scoop’ Delves Into Prince Andrew’s Teddy Bear Obsession in a Weird, Uncomfy Scene

Netflix‘s new film Scoop tells the true story of how BBC Newsnight producer and talent booker Sam McAlister (Billie Piper) managed to coax the disgraced Prince Andrew (Rufus Sewell) into an hour-long interview that would ultimately damn him in the public’s eyes. The BBC’s Prince Andrew & the Epstein Scandal was theoretically going to be the royal’s chance to refute claims that he had slept with then-underage sex traffic victim Virginia Giuffre, but between journalist Emily Maitlis’s (Gillian Anderson) brilliant approach and Andrew’s own incompetence, it soon became a major PR disaster for the Royal Family. Scoop pulls back the curtain of British broadcasting and palace comms to show us how McAlister’s determination and Albert’s ineffectual office collided to make this perfect storm of journalism happened.

Scoop also happens to features a scene where Prince Andrew tears into a palace maid (Mia Threapleton) for putting his beloved teddy bears in the wrong place. Huh?

Let’s back up. About forty minutes into Netflix’s Scoop, notorious billionaire sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein is arrested. We watch as Prince Andrew soaks in the news of his friend’s swift, but long-awaited, fall from grace. As the newsreader lists Epstein’s history of sexual crimes, Andrew exchanges a glance with the cowed maid making his bed and angrily says, “How many times?”

If you think Prince Andrew’s complaining about the constant public smearing his terrible buddy (and, by extension, he gets), you’d be wrong. He’s mad that the maid has put a stuffed kangaroo in the wrong spot on his bed. Andrew berates the domestic worker — coincidentally played by The Buccaneers‘s Mia Threapleton, aka the daughter of Kate Winslet — for her incompetence.

It’s weird, it’s uncomfortable, and it begs the question: does the real Prince Andrew have a teddy bear collection?

Indeed, he does!

According to The Sun, Andrew’s obsession with his teddy bears is very much a real thing! In 2022, former Buckingham Palace maid Sarah Briggs shared that when she worked for the royal as a twenty-something in the ’90s, there were no fewer than 72 individual stuffed animals that she was “drilled” on how to properly arrange.

“I even had a day’s training. Everything had to be just right. It was so peculiar,” Briggs told The Sun. “It was so odd. After all, he was a grown man who had served in the Falklands. But he absolutely loved the ­teddies and was very clear about how he wanted them arranged.”

As we see in Scoop, Prince Andrew likes his largest teddy bears to be positioned in the back, with smaller ones stationed up front.

“It took me half an hour to arrange them — most bizarre thing to be paid for,” Briggs said. “Then at bedtime I had to take all the teddies off and arrange them around the room. They each had a set place. We had to stack the smaller ones in an unused fireplace, again in size order, to make them look pretty.”

The Sun also reported that Andrew’s two favorite bears “were each given pride of place on two mahogany thrones at his bedside.”

So, yes, Scoop got it right: Prince Andrew is extremely anal about where each and every one of his teddy bears resides both day and night. If only he was as discerning when it came to his friend group…