Is ‘The Prince’ About Hunter Biden? Inside a Controversial New Movie

The Prince centers on a flailing addict named Parker (Scott Haze), the black sheep of a powerful American dynasty who’s grown up in his beloved older brother’s shadow. As his father’s high-profile presidential campaign starts ramping up, Parker’s brother dies suddenly, forcing the second son to get his act together and assume a leadership role in the family. Parker writes a glossy memoir outlining his struggles with substances and atoning for past misdeeds. He gets entangled in his father’s ambitious, well-connected political operation; specifically, some shady overseas dealings. The law starts catching up with him.

You don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to think this plot summary sounds a lot like a condensed, barely fictionalized biography of Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s second son. And that reading isn’t exactly a secret: A little more than a year ago, Deadline broke the news of The Prince’s development by labeling it a “Hunter Biden–inspired addiction pic.” An anonymous source told Deadline that the movie’s origins had nothing to do with the Bidens, but the writer David Mamet claimed otherwise in an interview some months earlier.

“These guys who did Sound of Freedom, they came to me and they said, ‘Do you want to write a movie for us?’” Mamet told The Daily Wire’s Andrew Klavan in a YouTube video titled “David Mamet DEMOLISHES Hollywood Executives and Brain-Dead Liberals.” “I said, ‘Yeah sure, what do you got?’ They said they wanted to do a movie about Hunter Biden.” Mamet told Klavan he would, so long as he could write the script without interference and not call the character Hunter Biden, while still drawing from the real man’s life.

The Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright of Glengarry Glen Ross and two-time Oscar nominee has long been a provocateur. More recently, he’s made comments in support of President Trump. Mamet’s remarks about how he approached The Prince—to say nothing of its connection to Sound of Freedom, a right-wing phenomenon that soared at the box office and was embraced by Trump himself—help explain the skepticism that’s surrounded the movie for the past year, even as it completed production with an esteemed supporting cast including Oscar winners J.K. Simmons and Nicolas Cage. Was The Prince designed as an anti-Biden spectacle, a salacious portrait of the infamous second son’s downfall primed for a Trump White House screening?

Speaking for the first time, its filmmakers tell Vanity Fair: Not really, no.

I’ve seen The Prince, and yes: Those Biden echoes are, initially, undeniably strong. But gradually, the movie also tells its own story. It’s a wild ride of a polemic that asks larger questions about American political power, where it resides, and how its narratives tend to go unchallenged.

The idea for the movie did not originate with Mamet, but director and producer Cameron Van Hoy, who started in the industry as a teen actor before pivoting to filmmaking. “I was just thinking about the world and America, and started examining privilege and power and addiction,” he says. “There’s this lack of accountability, for everyone who’s in charge, that doesn’t exist with regular people. And if there can be no consequences, there can be no change.” He brought the project to Scott Haze, whom he’s known since he was 18 years old. “I asked him to be in my first short film, and he was. It’s been a fast friendship ever since,” Van Hoy says.

Haze has built up an impressive filmography, from auteur dramas including Minari and Antlers to tentpoles like Jurassic World Dominion. He starred in several films helmed by James Franco, getting particularly strong notices as the lead in Child of God. The actor connected with Van Hoy’s idea, though not really its political undertones: Haze came of age with an absent father, and The Prince literalizes this concept. Though you feel the ominous, hovering presence of Parker’s father, you never actually see him in the movie.

“When I was 15, a therapist was like, ‘Your son hasn’t talked to you. Why don’t you have a conversation with your son?’” Haze tells me. “He goes, ‘Well, I don’t really have time.’ After his passing, we found out that he had a second family through 23andMe. I have a sister I didn’t know about. It’s like, ‘Oh, that’s probably why you weren’t there.’”

Haze signed on to both star in and produce The Prince. He already had a relationship with Mamet, which Van Hoy says brought the screenwriter into their process. When I ask the director about Mamet’s earlier comments—saying he was asked to write a movie about Hunter Biden—Van Hoy responds, “In early conversations about the project, those topics came up…. If David is referencing early conversations, that’s what he’s talking about.” (Mamet could not be reached for comment for this story.)

But he argues that’s not the film they wound up making. “The movie’s not about Hunter Biden, and I think anyone who can watch will probably see that,” Van Hoy says. “In discussing and beating out this idea, yeah, there’s some conversation of Hunter as an example, because it’s such an incredible American story and so interesting. But at the same time, it’s a timeless story.”

“When Dave came in, he took it in a whole different direction…. He’s very interested in just watching characters move without judging them in any particular way,” Van Hoy adds of Mamet’s script. “We’ve had such creative freedom on this movie, which is incredible. It’s so hard to make original, bold original films today in Hollywood.”

Haze has another notable screen credit: Sound of Freedom. That film explored a sex-trafficking rescue mission in Colombia, based on a real but controversial figure who has been widely covered in mainstream media. The Prince is backed by Sound of Freedom executive producer Sean Wolfington; notably, it also features a sex-trafficking storyline as Parker conducts clandestine business in the Middle East on behalf of his father.

The making of Sound of Freedom, in which Haze played a Homeland Security agent, collided with the rise of QAnon extremism—and the blurring of trafficking scandals with outlandish conspiracy theories. “The reason why I was in that movie was: People are getting taken every day—for real. I talked to people who were kidnapped,” Haze says now. “I don’t know if I want to go into all this, but certain people around that movie made that [political] thing happen like that because they were talking crazy shit. For me, I try to just stay in my lane. Real bad things happen to people, and I want to shine light on things like that. But I don’t want to get involved in making this political thing.”

He adds later, “Sound of Freedom—it’s not political to me. I understand how it became that. I hope that people see that this film isn’t that.”

In fact, that was his primary focus as a producer on The Prince. “It was very important for me not to make it political, not to make it about somebody specific. That was the one thing I wanted to for sure make happen. I was the champion for that,” Haze says. “I think the things going on that are wrong in this world are privilege and power and how that’s abused…. As long as I continue to just be true, to not taking a political side or telling stories with an agenda, I’m okay.”

What did Haze make of the Hunter Biden framing in the media when The Prince was first announced? “I was like, it’s clickbait—that’s what I thought,” he says. “If you watch the movie, it could be anybody.” Is he concerned that the damage has already been done—that, contrary to his number one goal, the movie has already been too politicized? “My politics is very much—how do I say this? I just really don’t like hate. If you don’t like gay people, I don’t want to talk to you. I hate that stuff,” he says. “For me, am I concerned?” He shakes his head. “I think that people are going to do what they’re going to do.”

Haze brings the conversation back to why he made the movie. Watching The Prince, his emotional connection to the material is clear; his performance is visceral and uncompromising. “When it comes to playing an addict, I’ve lost so many people to addiction and I know what that’s like,” he says. “These are just things that have been around me my whole life.” One bravura, Network-inspired scene—Van Hoy draws from ’70s political thrillers and social dramas as reference points throughout—found the actor digging deeper than he ever has on camera. “Is that acting? I don’t know. I’ll tell you this: I went backstage at the studio, and I cried for two and a half hours. I couldn’t quit sobbing,” Haze says. “I couldn’t move after the filming, at least for a week. It was a really, really hard one to go through.”

Van Hoy first pitched The Prince to Haze about a year and a half ago. The movie is now completed and seeking distribution, hoping to hit the film-festival circuit before long. The filmmakers acknowledge it’s had an unusually harmonious journey for a modern American independent film: The Prince came together quickly, with sufficient financing and an enviable ensemble also including Giancarlo Esposito, Andy García, and Simon Rex. “I got to see [Van Hoy] talking to Nic Cage and J.K. and Andy Garcia,” says Haze. “I’m the older one of us, and I felt like, ‘Wow, man, look at you!’”

It’s only Van Hoy’s second feature, coming off of the 2021 thriller Flinch. “I knew it was risky because I’m exploring American politics and privilege and power,” the director says. “It was a moment for me to be like, ‘Huh, there’s something challenging here—to do this right and to not make it partisan in any way. It felt a little dangerous.” Indeed, he’s reluctant to name any inspiration points for the story beyond his personal link to certain themes and the larger political ideas. He throws out Prince Harry as another “second son” he kept in mind, but otherwise reiterates: “This film is about fictitious characters in a fictitious world that is examining truths and themes that do exist today, as we can observe, but have existed for a very long time.”

The question, then, is whether The Prince can stand on its own, given how it’s been introduced to the world—and how the movie cryptically interacts with reality. “The nature of the false narrative in the media is massive, and it’s a big theme for this film,” Van Hoy argues. It’s one of the central ideas Mamet’s screenplay hammers at as it shifts into a more pointed gear. “We’re in a very polarized world, and if you’re not making waves to some degree, I don’t think you’re doing it right.”

Which is to say that Van Hoy isn’t bothered by how his film has been dissected as it finally goes out into the world. He knows more is coming, too. “Going into it, people are going to say what they want to say and think what they want to think, and that’s okay. I welcome and invite them to watch the film. I don’t have any worries. I’m quite excited, actually.”