Meghan Markle is opening up about her time on the game show “Deal or No Deal,” saying she felt mistreated while working as a “suitcase girl” during season 2.
The former working royal shared her opinions during the most recent episode of her podcast, “Archetypes,” while interviewing socialite Paris Hilton.
The 41-year-old mom of two was feeling reminiscent after catching an episode of “Deal or No Deal” on TV while flipping channels. She said seeing her old show on air “brought back a lot of memories.”
While Markle said she felt “grateful” for being cast on the game show in 2006, she felt her intellect was underutilized in the role, per Harper’s Bazaar.
“I had also studied international relations in college, and there were times when I was on set at ‘Deal or No Deal’ and thinking back to my time working as an intern at the U.S. Embassy in Argentina in Buenos Aires and being in the motorcade with the security of treasury at the time and being valued specifically for my brain. Here, I was being valued for something quite the opposite,” Markle explained.
She went on to say how the suitcase girls were expected to put on fake eyelashes, hair extensions, and padded bras, plus given vouchers for weekly spray tans.
“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 continued.
“When I look back at that time, I will never forget this one detail—because moments before we’d get onstage, there was a woman who ran the show, and she would be there backstage, and I can still hear her,” she went on. “She couldn’t properly pronounce my last name at the time, and I knew who she was talking to, because she would go, ‘Mark-el, suck it in! Mark-el, suck it in!'”
“I was thankful for the job, but not for how it made me feel, which was not smart,” the Duchess of Sussex told Hilton.
“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. And I would end up leaving with this pit in my stomach knowing that I was so much more than what was being objectified on the stage,” she concluded. “I didn’t like feeling 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.”
Hilton recalled feeling the same way on the set of her prior reality show, “The Simple Life,” when producers encouraged her to act like “the rich dumb blonde.”