Sixteen years after her brief stint on “Deal or No Deal,” Meghan Markle is opening up about her experience as a “briefcase girl.” During the Oct. 18 episode of her “Archetypes” podcast, Markle shared that she recently reflected on her time on the game show after she caught an old episode of it.
“It was solely about beauty and not necessarily about brains.”
“This brought back a lot of memories,” she said on her podcast. The Duchess of Sussex — who had an acting career before marrying Prince Harry and becoming a royal — explained that “Deal or No Deal” was less about working on her acting craft and more about having a job that could help her pay bills. She also pointed out how different the gig was from her college experience — at the time, she was studying international relations at Northwestern University.
“There were times 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, being in the motorcade with the security of treasury at the time, and being valued specifically for my brain,” Markle added. “Here, I was being valued for something quite the opposite.”
The former “Suits” actor went on to describe what the “Deal or No Deal” set looked like before tapings. “All the girls, we would line up and there were different stations for having your lashes put on, or your extensions put in, or the padding in your bra,” Markle shared. “We were even given spray tan vouchers each week because there was a very cookie-cutter idea of precisely what we should look like. It was solely about beauty and not necessarily about brains.”
Markle even recalled a time when she was told to watch her appearance on camera and instructed to “suck in” her stomach. “When I look back at that time, I’ll never forget this one detail — because moments before we’d get on stage, there was a woman who ran the show and she’d be there backstage, and I can still hear her,” she said. “She couldn’t properly pronounce my last name at the time and I knew who she was talking to because she would go, ‘Markle, suck it in! Markle, suck it in!'”
Markle ended up quitting the show, and though grateful for the experience, she said she didn’t like how unintelligent it made her feel. “I didn’t like feeling forced to be all looks and little substance,” she added. “And that’s how it felt for me, at the time. Being reduced to this specific archetype.”
The remainder of Markle’s podcast episode featured Paris Hilton as the two broke down the “bimbo” stereotype, which the latter said contributed to her past traumatic experience at her Utah boarding school, Provo Canyon School. Hilton previously opened up about the physical and emotional abuse she allegedly endured there in her intimate 2020 documentary, “This Is Paris.”