Former actor and the Duchess of Sussex Meghan Markle recalled her time working in 2006 in the game show Deal or No Deal and how it made her feel ‘reduced to a specific archetype’. Meghan spoke on her podcast Archetypes in the latest episode, Breaking down ‘The Bimbo’ with Paris Hilton and Iliza Shlesinger. She spoke about how she was a ‘briefcase girl’ on the show, which was ‘fascinating’ for her. She recalled being ‘grateful’ as she had a job that could pay her bills. (Also Read | Meghan Markle, Deepika Padukone discuss getting help for her mental health)
Meghan also said, “I had also studied international relations in college, and there were times when I was on set at Deal or No Deal and thinking back to my time working as an intern at the US Embassy in Argentina in Buenos Aires and being in the motorcade with the security of treasury at the time and being valued specifically for my brain. Here, I was being valued for something quite the opposite.”
She also recalled that before the tapings of the show, models would line up for lashes, extensions, and padding in the bra and were even given spray tan vouchers each week. Meghan added, “There was a very cookie-cutter idea of precisely what we should look like. It was solely about beauty and not necessarily about brains.”
Meghan also spoke about an incident during her time on the show, “There was a woman who ran the show and she’d be there backstage, and I can still hear her. She couldn’t properly pronounce my last name at the time and I knew who she was talking to because she’d go, ‘Markle, suck it in! Markle, suck it in!’”
She added that she quit the show as she didn’t like how it made her feel, ‘which was not smart’. “I would end up leaving with this pit in my stomach knowing that I was so much more than what was being objectified on the stage. I didn’t like feeling forced to be all looks and little substance, and that’s how it felt for me at the time, being reduced to this specific archetype,” she added.
Meghan worked in several shows including Century City (2004), The War at Home (2006) and CSI: NY (2006). She was a briefcase girl on 34 episodes of the show from 2006-2007. She also featured in Get Him to the Greek, Remember Me, The Candidate, Horrible Bosses in 2011. Her last show was Suits in which she worked from 2011-2017.
She tied the knot with Prince Harry in 2018. They are parents to son Archie, born in 2019, and daughter Lilibet, born in 2021. In 2020, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex announced they were stepping back as senior members of the royal family. The couple then moved to the US.