Meghan Markle, 41, opened up about her experience as a “briefcase girl” on the game show Deal or No Deal, when she chatted with Paris Hilton on the new episode of her Spotify podcast Archetypes. “I was thankful for the job, but not for how it made me feel, which was not smart,” Meghan explained. “And by the way, I was surrounded by smart women on that stage with me, but that wasn’t the focus of why we were there.”
The Duchess of Sussex explained that she would wrap each episode of the Howie Mandel hosted show “with this pit in my stomach know that I was so much more than what was being objectified on the stage.” Meghan continued, “I didn’t like being 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: the word ‘bimbo.’ ”
Meghan also recalled a moment on the show when a woman on the production team told her to look skinnier. “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!’ ” Meghan recalled, noting that she eventually quit the game show because of these issues.
In her conversation with Paris, which was about the “bimbos” archetype, Meghan shared her hopes for her and Prince Harry‘s 1-year-old daughter Lilibet Diana as a woman in society. ‘I want our daughter to aspire to be slightly higher. Yeah, I want my Lili to want to be educated and want to be smart and to pride herself on those things,” she said.
Meghan was on Deal or No Deal for 34 episodes from 2006 to 2007, before she landed her role on the legal drama Suits. After Meghan and Harry quit the royal family in 2020, they moved to California where they’re raising their two children, daughter Lilibet and son Archie Harrison, 3. Meghan hosts the Archetypes podcast where she speaks with different women about the ways they’re perceived.