Before she crossed the pond for love, Meghan Markle was a successful actress in the states — landing her biggest role on the legal drama Suits.
The USA Network series, which ran for nine seasons from 2011 to 2020, was set at a fictitious New York City law firm and followed Mike Ross (Patrick J. Adams) as he used his photographic memory to talk his way into a job working for attorney Harvey Specter (Gabriel Macht), despite being a college dropout.
Markle portrayed Rachel Zane — an ambitious paralegal and daughter of one of the best lawyers in the city (played by Wendell Pierce) — who eventually became a love interest for Adams’ Mike. She later exited the series at the end of season 7 in 2018.
Series creator Aaron Korsh revealed in a 2017 BBC interview that he wrote Markle off the show as a precaution well before she made the final decision to move across the pond to be with now-husband Prince Harry, whom she married in May 2018.
“What we decided to do [was to] say, ‘Look, I would rather have good things happen to Meghan in her life,’ which would likely mean her leaving the show. So let’s plan on that and it’s much easier to undo that, if it came to it, than to just plan on her staying forever and then finding out she’s going to go. And the only way to write a character out like that would be if they got hit by a bus or something.”
Scroll below to read everything Markle has said about her time on Suits over the years:
