READY FOR THEIR CLOSE-UP
New Netflix docuseries Harry & Meghan offers up a few surprises
After spending six years — the entirety of their courtship, engagement, marriage and early parenthood — under the watchful, often reproachful eye of the tabloid press, you can hardly blame the Duke and Duchess of Sussex for wanting to tell their side of the story.
That's the motivating idea behind Harry & Meghan, the new six-part Netflix docuseries about the couple. (The first three episodes premièred Thursday; the next batch air Dec. 15).
Directed by Liz Garbus, the series is intended as a corrective to long-held assumptions about the royal couple who “stepped back” from their roles in 2020 to raise a family in California — assumptions about their relationship with the media, for example, as well as with Meghan's family and Harry's.
Here are the most startling revelations from Harry & Meghan thus far.
1 Camping trip
Harry and Meghan spent a week camping in Botswana together after only a couple of dates. Because the two were having trouble co-ordinating their busy schedules, Harry invited Meghan to come along on a trip to the African country, with which he has said he has a “deep” connection. Before she left, Meghan says onscreen, she told friends she sure hoped she and Harry got along as well as they thought; she then recalls sleeping in a tent with the prince and waking at night to the sound of an elephant munching leaves just overhead.
2 Paparazzi problems
After the British media found out about their relationship, Meghan says Harry warned her not to engage with paparazzi, even cordially, for fear she'd be said to be courting attention.
Soon after tabloid photographers began following Meghan around, she stopped one day to greet them and tell them to stay warm in the Toronto weather. Harry immediately told her not to do that, she says. “I was like, `I'm just trying to be pleasant. I don't know what to do, I've never dealt with this before.' He says, `Right, but the U.K. media is saying you love it.'”
Photographers stalked and harassed Meghan in Toronto (where she lived while she was filming the series Suits).
Meghan says she alerted authorities when paparazzi staked out her house but initially received little assistance. “I said to the police, `If any other woman in Toronto said to you, “I have six grown men who are sleeping in their cars around my house and following me everywhere I go, and I feel scared,” wouldn't you say it was stalking?' And they said, `Yes, but there's really nothing we can do because of who you're dating.'” She finally got security help, she says, after receiving a death threat.
3 Clothing choices
Meghan says she strategically wore mostly beige, white and black clothing while she and Harry lived in London.
Royals can't wear the same colour as the queen at group events, or even the same colour as another more senior royal, Meghan says. So she opted for neutrals, both to avoid accidentally matching the queen's famously jewel-toned wardrobe and to blend in.
4 Family ties
Meghan enjoys a close relationship with Ashleigh Hale, the biological daughter of her half sister Samantha Markle.
Meghan says in the docuseries that she barely knows Samantha, the half sister who has claimed she “raised” Meghan for 12 years. Hale, too — who was adopted as a young child by her paternal grandparents — says she was estranged from Samantha until 2007, and met Meghan then, too. Despite the fact that Hale is technically Meghan's niece, the two developed a relationship that both Hale and Meghan describe as more like that of sisters.
5 Wedding woes
Despite their close relationship, Meghan says, she and Harry were discouraged from inviting Hale to their wedding in 2018.
The small communications team at Kensington Palace was already spread thin representing the two of them as well as Prince William and Princess Catherine. Consequently, the couple says, the team was not up to the task of explaining to the public or the press why Samantha wouldn't be invited to the nuptials but Samantha's biological daughter would.