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Meghan Markle reflected on her time as a “briefcase girl” on Deal or No Deal in the latest episode of her Spotify podcast Archetypes. The Duchess of Sussex, 41, recalled recently watching an episode of the game show, which “brought back a lot of memories.”
“Back in 2006, I had a short stint as a briefcase girl on the US version of the game show. Now, my experience on the show, which included holding said briefcase on stage, alongside 25 other women doing the same, it was, for me, fascinating. I had studied acting in college, at Northwestern University. And, like a lot of the other women standing on stage with me, acting was what I was pursuing,” Meghan said.
Although Meghan pointed out that “Deal or No Deal wasn’t about acting,” she was “really grateful as an auditioning actress to have a job” that could pay her bills. “I had income, I was part of the union, I had health insurance, it was great. And yet… 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 Secretary of Treasury at the time and being valued specifically for my brain. Here I was being valued for something quite the opposite,” the Suits alum said.
Meghan shared that before tapings of the show, the women would line up and there were different station to have lashes put on, extensions put in or to put padding in bras. The Duchess also revealed that each week they were given spray tan vouchers “because there was a very cookie cutter idea of precisely what we should look like. It was solely about beauty - and not necessarily about brains.”
She continued, “And when I look back at that time, I will never- I will never forget this one detail because moments before we’d get on stage, there was a woman who ran the show and she would be there backstage, and I can still hear her. 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!”
Meghan ended up quitting the show. “Like I said, I was thankful for the job, but not for how it made me feel. Which was… not smart. 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 admitted. “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.”
Meghan interviewed Paris Hilton on the sixth episode of Archetypes, which was released on Oct. 18. The Duchess broke down the labels of “bimbo” and “dumb blonde” with The Simple Life star. At the end of the episode, Meghan confessed that she was “embarrassed to admit it” that she had a “judgment about Paris” and she doesn’t like “having judgment.” The Duchess said, “I’m sorry for having judged her. I didn’t know her. And as I assured her, I wasn’t looking for a gotcha moment. I was looking for a got you moment. As in the real you. And I think we did.”