Paul Bettany and Claire Foy are sparring as the Duke and Duchess of Argyll in the first trailer for Prime Video’s “A Very British Scandal.”
The drama series, which hails from the creators of “A Very English Scandal,” follows the couple’s divorce in the 1960s, which proved to be one of the most notorious, extraordinary, and brutal legal cases of the 20th century.
Foy plays Margaret, the Duchess of Argyll, who was famed for her beauty and charisma before the Duke (Bettany) exposed her to the press with accusations of forgery, theft, violence, drug-taking, secret recording, bribery, and an explicit Polaroid picture.
The trailer begins with a rather tense interaction between the two in which Bettany’s Duke greets his Duchess with “Hello, Satan.”
“You bastard,” she replies, before the video cuts to their first meeting, where they quickly become enamored of each other. It isn’t long before their relationship dissolves into resentment.
The series promises to turn the couple’s scandal inside out in order to explore the social and political climate of postwar Britain, looking at attitudes towards women, and asking whether institutional misogyny was widespread at the time. As her contemporaries, the press, and the judiciary sought to vilify her, Margaret kept her head held high with bravery and resilience, refusing to go quietly as she was betrayed by her friends and publicly shamed by a society that reveled in her fall from grace.
“A Very British Scandal” hails from Blueprint Pictures, the studio behind Amazon and BBC One’s “A Very English Scandal,” and Amazon Studios. The season will be directed by Anne Sewitsky and produced by Chris Ballantyne. Executive producers include Graham Broadbent, Pete Czernin, Diarmuid McKeown and Delyth Scudamore for Blueprint Pictures, Lucy Richer for the BBC, Phelps, Sewitsky, Foy, Kate Triggs and Dominic Treadwell-Collins.
Written by Sarah Phelps (“The Pale Horse,” “Dublin Murders”), the three, 60-minute episodes of “A Very British Scandal” debuts on Prime Video on April 22.