We began seated in the garden of Oprah Winfrey and Meghan Markle’s mutual “friend.” You didn’t have to be familiar with royal protocol regarding makeup to understand the significance of Markle’s look: with her waterline deeply blackened, something we haven’t seen since her “Suits” days, she gave off the esprit of a young woman whose capacity for placation had been tapped out. Markle and Oprah sat across from each other, Markle’s husband, Harry, not yet summoned. The first hour would be just the two of them. Oprah said that there hadn’t been an agreement between the parties on what would be discussed, and I believed her. Her initial questions were, for the viewer, something of a blitz education in media analysis: What was it like to meet the Queen? Had Markle been accepted initially by the family? Together, Oprah and Markle stripped the royal wedding of its gloss. Listing all the terrible things that the tabloid establishment launched at Markle—while headlines accumulated on our screens, like a rash—Oprah mentioned a nickname, “Hurricane Meghan.” “Oh, I hadn’t heard that,” Markle said, tightly grinning.
Meghan and Harry, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, stepped away from the royal family about a year ago, but they have not gone quietly. Americans saw their gripping interview, “Oprah with Meghan and Harry,” first, a day before it would air in the U.K., and it was shaped to feed an eminently American point of view. “It’s very easy, especially as an American, to go, ‘Oh, these are famous people,’ ” Markle said, toward the beginning of the two-hour special. “No, this is a completely different ball game.” There seemed to be a joint understanding between Markle and Oprah of the Royal Family as a kind of foreign monstrosity, tyrannizing itself into pain and insanity. It was all in the expressions and the ad-libs, particularly from Oprah: a “What!” or an extended “Woooow,” accompanied by her eyes rolling or bulging, her head shaking and her lower lip falling slack.
This instantly iconic artifact of pop culture could not have been without Oprah, a truly singular examiner. Is what she does simply interviewing? She certainly asks questions, difficult ones, and doggedly follows up on hedges or evasive responses. But she is also something of an emissary, a reactive translator of emotion, a master weaver, pulling disparate revelations into a collective portrait that colonizes the mind. The question is never just a question; the subject is helpless to her storytelling, a rigorous empathy that was like refuge to the Duke and Duchess, who have long been prostrate to the narratives of the tabloids. “Were you silent,” Oprah asked Markle, “or were you silenced?” When she does this, it is like opening a door. And Markle walked right in.
Cross-culturally, there is an expectation that the woman who “speaks out” about her abuse does so guilelessly. Markle is the modern hero who instead deploys her savvy and her charisma—another reason, besides the obvious, that she is compared to Princess Diana. In the interview with Oprah, Markle was not afraid to participate when the talk took on the chatty tone of gossip. She was not afraid to speak from the position of defense. In our era of workplace reckoning, it was helpful that Markle referred to her duties as a Duchess as her “job.” Oprah asked about a tabloid story: that Markle had made Kate Middleton cry in the days before her wedding with Harry. “The reverse happened,” Markle said, before going on to, quite plainly, describe Middleton’s tantrum involving a flower-girl dress. “People around you knew that that wasn’t true?” Oprah asked. “Everyone in the institution knew it wasn’t true,” Markle replied. “So why didn’t somebody just say that?” Oprah prodded, again acting as proxy for the befuddled American viewer. “That’s a good question,” Markle responded. Less than a day later, the conversation has already intensified Americans’ parasocial connection to the couple; Black women, whom everyone wants to cater to, are seeing themselves in the plight of Markle.
It was a choice to restrain certain details—ones that would decimate members of the family that did not accept her—that made Markle’s perspective ring so viscerally. It was as if the truth was too abhorrent to let loose in its fullest iteration, and as if Markle still bore the trauma of being locked away and muzzled. Emphasizing her outsider perspective, she painted a cinematic picture of a spineless family—which she sometimes referred to as the Firm or the Institution—in thrall to ominous, shadowy systems of control. Markle used the pronoun “they” so much, as in, “They were willing to lie to protect other members of the family, but they wouldn’t tell the truth to protect me and my husband.” Markle explained that one Royal Family member questioned how dark the skin of her son, Archie, would be, but Markle did not reveal that person’s identity. (Here Oprah was at the top of her game: she made a spectacle of reflective listening, practically squawking out her disgust.) By abstracting the offender, Markle indicted the entire racist institution. She demystified it all while maintaining some of the ugly mystique.
The interview special had an odd structure. In one moment, Oprah was eliciting from Markle a confession that might drain the dying British monarchy of its last dredges of cultural esteem, and in the next Oprah was sitting with Meghan and Harry at their home in Santa Barbara, sidled along the fence of a chicken coop marked with a sign that reads “Archie’s Chick Inn—established 2021,” asking after the provenance of the fowl. In these scenes, with their bright shots of earth and beast, you can nearly smell the musk of life. Markle, dressed down in an olive-green hoodie and jeans, the picture of Californian peace, informs Oprah that the birds came from a factory, where they were no doubt destined to become meat; later, Markle notes that she also got her pup, Guy, from a kill shelter. “I just love rescuing,” she said. The quaint life-style snapshots, asymmetrically laced amid the shockingly frank interview, surreally operate as a reminder of Royal existence. It is as if Markle is once again the restrained Duchess, having to resort to metaphor to convey the life-and-death crisis she is in.
There was one question Oprah did not ask but that seemed to be on her tongue: Should the monarchy end? Its existence depends on its progeny, and its latest generation has not found its strictures tenable. The children of that generation—the year-old Archie and Meghan and Harry’s unborn daughter—are not considered fit enough for the title of prince or princess, owing to their mixed-race ancestry. The seemingly extraneous detail of Tyler Perry providing shelter and security to the Duke and Duchess after they left the U.K. is almost absurd in its significance; when the couple was cut off from financial support, in the middle of a pandemic, it was a Black American movie mogul who had to come to their aid. Markle admitted, with a heartbreaking remove, that the situation had nearly driven her to suicide. After going to the Royal Family’s equivalent of “human resources,” Markle said, she was rebuffed, warned of how her emergency would look to the public. The rot of the institution is now fully exposed. The beauty of the new family, extricated from the system, suggested that a new, secular system of power was possible.
In the second hour of the special, Harry joined his wife. Oprah did a remarkable thing: she covered the same issues that she’d gone over with Markle, only this time with Harry present. “You left because you were asking for help and couldn’t get it?” she asked him. The Duke of Sussex seemed alternately resolute and traumatized, expressing a boy’s love for his “grandmother” and his feelings of abandonment. “I feel really let down,” he said. For his father, Charles, who Harry said has stopped taking his calls, and his brother, William, he had a fraught pity: “My father and my brother—they are trapped. They don’t get to leave.” When Oprah pressed him, again, on the question of who made the racist comment about Archie, Harry’s refusal to out the person was spikier. He was attempting to control a feeling different from Markle’s: shame.
All three participants did their part to bring the haunting aura of the people’s princess to the expanse of the garden. Early on, Oprah invoked Martin Bashir’s groundbreaking talk with Princess Diana, in which she uttered the revelation that “there were three of us in the marriage,” following her breakup with Charles. “My biggest concern was history repeating itself,” Harry said. “And when I’m talking about history,” he added, aware that he was speaking euphemistically, “I’m talking about my mother.” The notion of popularity—which, in Diana’s case, was inextricably linked to her embrace of the dark-skinned people of the Commonwealth—was brought up by Oprah. Markle smirked when Oprah asked the couple if they thought jealousy was a cause of the bad treatment that they had received from the Royal Family. It was Diana’s smirk.
The interview concluded on a surprising note. First we got the obligatory shilling of the couple’s deals with Spotify and Netflix, the Archewell Foundation. In Oprah’s typical manner, she flipped dramatically between filler questions—asking about Archie’s favorite word—and existential inquiries, including whether the couple has any regrets. In answering the latter, Markle replied that it was believing she would have been supported in her new job. In a sense, “Oprah with Meghan and Harry” is a coming out for Markle, a mixed-raced woman who had once believed that love could conquer the always eminent threat of blood. Knowing that the problem was insurmountable, that it began with and would always adhere to the brutal organizing logic of colonialism, Harry and Meghan insist that, had they been supported, they’d have stayed with the family regardless. They were willing, and they had all sorts of potential as cultural politicians. If only the family hadn’t messed this up.
