Meghan Markle ‘Will Never Forget’ Being Told 3 Words Backstage on ‘Deal or No Deal’
Meghan Markle appeared on Deal or No Deal years ago but there’s a certain backstage moment she’ll “never forget.” During Archetypes, the Duchess of Sussex recalled her time as a “briefcase girl.” Along the way, she revealed the three words she “can still hear” someone telling her backstage.
Seeing ‘Deal or No Deal’ on TV ‘bought back a lot of memories’ for Meghan Markle
Meghan started the Oct. 18 episode of her Spotify podcast titled, “Breaking down ‘The Bimbo’ with Paris Hilton,” by revisiting her past. Specifically, being on Deal or No Deal from 2006 to 2007.
“The other night I was flipping through the channels on TV,” she began. “This, by the way, is a rarity when you have two children under the age of four,” she added, referring to her and Prince Harry’s children, Archie, 3, and Lilibet, 1. “But I saw an episode of a game show called Deal or No Deal.”
“This brought back a lot of memories,” she continued.
“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,” she said.
“So while Deal or No Deal wasn’t about acting,” Meghan was, at the time, “really grateful” she had a job that paid her bills as an “auditioning actress.”
Meghan Markle clearly remembers being told to ‘suck it in’ backstage on ‘Deal or No Deal’
The Duchess of Sussex went on to share a “detail” from the game show she’ll “never forget.” Just before taking the stage with her fellow “briefcase girls,” Meghan, now 41, would hear someone tell her to “suck in.”
“When I look back at that time I will never, 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,” Meghan recalled.
“She couldn’t properly pronounce my last name at the time, and I knew who she was talking to because she would go, ‘Markel, suck in. Markel, suck it in,’” she said.
Meghan, who years earlier admitted to disliking the job, eventually quit. “Like I said, I was thankful for the job but not for how it made me feel which was not smart,” she told listeners.
Meghan Markle didn’t the ‘all looks and little substance’ part of being on ‘Deal or No Deal’
“I was surrounded by smart women on that stage with me. But that wasn’t the focus of why we were there,” Meghan continued, saying she’d leave with a “pit” in her stomach “knowing” she was “so much more than what was being objectified on the stage.”
“I didn’t like feeling forced to be all looks and little substance,” she recalled. “And that’s how it felt for me at the time, being reduced to this specific archetype.”
She remembered the show being a stark contrast to interning at the U.S. Embassy in Argentina, Buenos Aires, and “being valued specifically for my brain.”
“Here, I was being valued for something quite the opposite … Before the tapings of the show, all the girls, we would line up.” Meghan proceeded to list off “stations” including false lashes, extensions, or “padding in your bra.”
“We were even given spray-tan vouchers each week because there was a very cookie-cutter idea, of precisely what we should look like,” she said. “It was solely about beauty and not necessarily about brains.”
