Friends supporting friends! Serena Williams shared on Tuesday a previously unseen photo of herself with her daughter Olympia and “dear friend” Meghan Markle . The image appears to have been taken in 2019 when the Duchess of Sussex traveled to New York to watch the tennis star play in the US Open.
Serena posted the photo on Instagram, promoting Meghan’s new Spotify podcast, Archetypes. “I loved talking about so many important topics with my dear friend Meghan as her first guest on #archetypes for @spotify! It’s out now and worth the listen, especially if you’re ambitious ❤️,” she captioned the photo.
Serena was Meghan’s first guest on the podcast, which debuted on Aug. 23. “I asked her to come on to talk with me about that dirty, dirty word when it comes to women – ambition,” the Duchess said. During the premiere episode, the pair also reminisced about when they first met.
“Do you remember when we met for the first time? I was thinking about that. Do you remember?” Meghan asked, to which Serena said, “Yeah. At that game, right?”
“It was the same year as the Super Bowl when the Super Bowl was in New York. I had never been before. And then I show up and I see you walking towards someone. And I remember going, ‘Oh my gosh, who’s Serena Williams going to talk to you?’ And I look behind me, and when I turned around, you were there in front of me,” Meghan replied.
The Duchess revealed that they “became such fast friends.”
“Yeah. We have a lot in common,” Serena said. Meghan added, “I know, so much. I mean, the things that people think and the things that people don’t. But in our friendship when you have to see things that are mischaracterizing of me, but you experience behind closed doors the pain that I’m going through and vice versa. Right? But I think what’s so interesting is even though that’s on a world stage, I don’t know if that feels much different for any woman.”
She continued, “If you’re in a small town and you see someone saying something about your best friend that is just completely untrue, how that feels, you know, when I was talking about all the different archetypes that women are affected by and just in terms of if a man is ambitious, for example, that is so celebrated. But you look at a woman, a woman like yourself, who I think is incredibly ambitious and that’s a testament to who you are as a person, but that’s also why you’ve become so successful. “
Archetypes, which is the first podcast series as part of Spotify and Archewell Audio’s multi-year partnership, is “about the labels and tropes that try to hold women back.” Next week’s episode will feature a conversation with Mariah Carey.