And the Oscar for Best Actress is awarded to...
‘The following artist, nominated for Best Actress in a Leading Role, delivered her performance with complexity, nuance and depth. She brought to life a young, independent woman and mother who was forced to fight back against often unsurvivable odds. She illuminated a truth, on screen, that might help others facing similar challenges in real life. Let’s take a look at some of her best work now…”
Were Meghan Markle to be nominated at the Oscars – as she deserves to be for her featurelength drama, co-starring Oprah Winfrey and Prince Harry – the Academy would have trouble choosing which clip best showcases her talent. But in the end, I think it would have to be the Little Mermaid scene.
Some years ago, the Duchess of Sussex told Oprah, she was sitting in Nottingham Cottage, “and The Little Mermaid came on?” That’s not a question, incidentally, but like so many of the poignant truths Meghan shared with the world during her interview, it was delivered with the rising inflection favoured by Southern Californian teenage girls, known as “upspeak”.
The purpose of “upspeak”? To turn definitive declarations and aggressions into “reassurance-seeking” questions. To portray a woman with iron determination as a little girl lost.
Should the subtext not be clear to all here, Meghan is Rapunzel now, imprisoned in her Kensington Palace tower. Because, as she says elsewhere in the drama, she was only able to leave the house “twice in four months”. Really? But back to the award-winning scene. “And I went: Oh my God? She [the Little Mermaid] falls in love with the prince and, because of that, she has to lose her voice.” Pause. Eye-misting. A small smile pushing through the pain. “But by the end, she gets her voice back.”
Boom. Deafening applause. Standing ovation. Although overlooked throughout her career – first for the 2011 TV movie The Boys and Girls Guide to Getting Down, and then for her 2016 Hallmark film, Dater’s
Handbook – the Oscar for Best Actress 2021 goes to … Meghan Markle. Daniel Day-lewis has nothing on this woman, either in terms of methodology or preparation. The pauses before Meghan answered Oprah’s most challenging questions were, in many ways, the high points. The heaving maternal chest, the mid-distance stares, as she wrestles with whether to say the things she decided to make public months if not years ago.
Because this interview was as meticulously choreographed as the twin flyaway hair strands Meghan uses as a prop throughout her performance, but it’s important for her to show every push and pull of that inner tug-of-war to up the drama. Just as she needs us to know, time and time again throughout this two-hour emotional tour-de-force, how “naive” she was.
This would make her unique. After
over a decade living in LA – where I’ve interviewed and socialised with actors daily – I have yet to meet a naive actress. Yet Meghan was so guileless, she assures Oprah, that she knew nothing about either the Royal family or what she was getting herself into. She has never looked up Prince Harry online. She “never researched what it would mean” to be his girlfriend or become his wife. She “honestly” thought The Firm were looking out for her best interests – it was left to Meghan’s friends to inform her, again, how naive she was. She “didn’t have a plan”, and “genuinely hadn’t thought of ” profiting from her royal title with whopping Netflix and Spotify deals.
Journalists famously ask leading questions. Meghan is the only celebrity interviewee I’ve ever seen to give such leading answers she might as well have been pulling poor Oprah along by a leash. She’d worked out exactly how to throw Kate under the bus while not wanting “in any way to be disparaging about her”. She’s “advocated for so long for women to use their voice”, she says on International Women’s Day (nothing has been left to chance here). “And then, I was silent …” Oh, Meghan, what are you saying? Silent … or silenced?
However superb, Meghan’s performance was not without the odd misstep. The talking over and interrupting Harry sat awkwardly with her professed vulnerability. The equating of her pain to a pandemic that has killed 117 million people was regrettable. The momentary loss of poise surrounding talk of lost titles.
And Oprah, usually such a fantastic interviewer, might also have taken a journalistic misstep of her own. Because when Meghan explains that “This morning, I woke up earlier than H and saw a note from someone in our team in the UK saying that the Duke of Edinburgh had gone to the hospital”, did this not beg for one of Oprah’s famous: “Wa-wa-wait a minute! You found out today – and still you went ahead with this interview? Really?”
As Meghan points out: “Life is about storytelling, right? About the stories we tell ourselves and what we buy into.” So let’s just sit back and watch how this “fairytale” pans out.