Speaking on a podcast, Great Britain’s Prince Harry stated that being in the spotlight his whole life felt like “a mix between “The Truman Show” and being in a zoo.”
Harry was interviewed by podcast hosts Dax Shepard and Monica Padman on the “Armchair Expert” podcast. When Shepard commented that Harry’s life must have felt as if he were in “The Truman Show” Harry responded:
A mix between ‘The Truman Show” and being in a zoo. … The biggest issue for me was that being born into it you inherit the risk, you inherit the risk that comes with it — you inherit every element of it without choice and because of the way that the UK media are, they feel an ownership over you. Literally — like a full-on ownership — and then they give the impression to some, well most, of their readers that that is the case, but I think it’s a really dangerous place to be if you don’t have a choice. But then of course people, quite rightly, will turn around and go, “So what if you didn’t have a choice? It was privilege.”
Padman theorized, “I’m gonna say this because I don’t think you can, or people will maybe attack you for it but it’s really true: when you talk about going to the Commonwealth and you grew up like that and you had to empathize with all these people who are presumably much “worse situations than you,” and they were, they were much worse situations, but you were in a horrible situation, too, and had to put on a smile and walk around and be the person comforting. But in some ways those people had more freedom than you did. And I think that is a hard thing to reconcile, like, ‘Oh, I’m in a cage.’ Or maybe you didn’t know that yet, but ‘I’m supposed to be the smiley one and I’m supposed to be the one comforting.’”
“Yes. It’s the job, right?” Harry responded. “Grin and bear it. Get on with it. I was in my early twenties; I was a case of, “I don’t want this job. I don’t want to be here; I don’t want to be doing this. Look at what it did to my mum. How am I ever going to settle down and have a wife and a family when I know that it’s going to happen again. Because I’ve seen behind the curtain. I’ve seen the business model and I know how this operation runs and how it works; I don’t want to be part of this.”
Harry later commented, “I feel way more connection to those free people who you talk about, emotionally free people, and I guess systemic-free people, I feel way more connection to people I met and work with in parts of Africa and New Zealand and Australia and Canada or whatever it is, and I’m fortunate like that, because the privilege does give you blinkers; mine were never particularly on straight; I’ve always felt different.”
Harry also said there were times in his life when he felt helpless, saying:
One, when I was a kid in the back of the car with my mom being chased by paparazzi, two was in Afghanistan in an Apache helicopter and then the third one was with my wife. And those were the moments in my life where, yeah, feeling helpless hurts. It really hurts, and that’s when you think to yourself, “S***, like, I got the privilege. I got the platform. I got the influence, and even I can’t fix this. I can’t change this.