Meghan Markle‘s time as a “briefcase girl” on Deal or No Deal wasn’t as easy as it looked because the job required her to fit into a beauty stereotype that made her uncomfortable. The Duchess of Sussex made that revelation on the latest episode of her Spotify podcast, Archetypes.
The game show came up in the podcast with guest Paris Hilton because Meghan caught a rare repeat on TV, and it made her think of how working on the show made her feel. “There were times 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,” she recalled.
While she was “thankful” for the work, the job entailed all of the “briefcase girls” to look a certain way. They had hair extensions, spray tans, padding for their bras, and false eyelashes. “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 added. The Duchess of Sussex even remembers being told by one of the backstage crew members, “‘Markle, suck it in! Markle, suck it in!'”
The way the show made her feel, “which was not smart,” was the reason she quit the show. “I was surrounded by smart women on that stage with me, but that wasn’t the focus of why we were there. 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,” Meghan noted. “I didn’t like being 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.”
Before you go, click here to see more of Meghan Markle & Prince Harry’s milestones since leaving the royal family.
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