On the outside. Meghan Markle opened up about feeling like she didn’t belong in the British royal family while discussing her pre-exit experience in Netflix’s Harry & Meghan.
The Suits alum, 41, looked back on her rocky road with the royals during the final three episodes of the docuseries, which debuted on Thursday, December 15. The fourth installment picked up just before Meghan’s May 2018 wedding to Prince Harry as she prepared to officially become a senior member of The Firm.
“There was this moment where our private secretary, she worked for the queen for, I think, 20 years,” the California native recalled at the beginning of episode 4. “And what she said to me was, ‘It’s like this fish that is swimming perfectly, powerful, it’s on the right current and one day this little organism comes in. This foreign organism. And the entire thing goes, “What is that? What is it doing here? It doesn’t look like us, it doesn’t move like us. We don’t like it, get it off of us.”‘”
The “Archetypes” podcast host continued: “She just explained that, you know, that they’ll soon see that it’s stronger, faster [and] better with this organism as part of it. It will be hard at the beginning for them to adjust to this new thing, but then it will be amazing. And I was really hopeful that that was true.”
Meghan and Harry, 38, unpacked their royal ups and downs and gave an unfiltered look at the aftermath of their exit in the candid Netflix series, the first part of which dropped on December 8. In volume 2, the couple looked back on what pushed them to announce their plans to step away from the royal spotlight in January 2020.
“The issue is when someone who’s marrying in — who should be a supporting act — is then stealing the limelight or is doing the job better than the person who is born to do this. That upsets people,” Harry claimed in episode 4. “It shifts the balance.”
The former military pilot noted that the way Meghan was being treated in the British press played a large role in the duo’s decision. “The lies, that’s one thing. You kind of get used to that when you live within this family. But what they were doing to her and the effect that it was having on her, like, enough. Enough of the pain, enough of the suffering,” he said, comparing his wife’s struggles to what his late mother, Princess Diana, went through before her 1997 death. “No one sees what’s happening behind closed doors.”
In the following episode, Harry outlined what went down when he met with his father, King Charles III, brother Prince William and Queen Elizabeth II to discuss his and Meghan’s next steps. The conversation took place in the U.K. in January 2020 — and the Bench author wasn’t included.
“Imagine a conversation, a round-table discussion, about the future of your life, when the stakes are this high, and you as the mom and the wife — and the target in many regards — aren’t invited to have a seat at the table,” Meghan told the cameras.
The meeting was tense, but Harry pointed out that he doesn’t fault his late grandmother for remaining neutral. “You have to understand that, from the family’s perspective, especially from hers, there are ways of doing things, and her ultimate sort of mission, goal/responsibility is the institution,” he explained. “People around her are telling her, ‘By the way, that proposal, or these two doing X, Y, Z, is going to be seen as an attack on the institution.’ Then she’s gonna go on the advice that she’s given. It was really hard.”
After making their official announcement, the Archewell cofounders moved to California, where they’re raising son Archie, 3, and daughter Lilibet, 18 months. “There’s times when I’ve been angry,” Harry confessed in the finale. “But I can’t be that angry because I genuinely feel that I — and we — are exactly where we’re supposed to be.”
All six episodes of Harry & Meghan are available to stream on Netflix.
