The wait is over! After weeks of anticipation, Oprah Winfrey’s tell-all interview with Prince Harry and the former Meghan Markle finally aired on Sunday night… and it was explosive!
We rounded-up the 11 biggest bombshells from the two-hour affair you need to know tomorrow morning before you stop by the office water cooler on Zoom.
1. They actually eloped.
Meghan told Winfrey that three days before their wedding in 2018, she and Harry actually tied the knot.
“No one knows that,” she explained. “We called the archbishop and just said, look, this thing, this spectacle is for the world, but we want our union between us, so the vows that we have framed in our room are just the two of us in our backyard with the archbishop of Canterbury.”
“Just the three of us,” Harry added.
2. Meghan had to learn how to curtsy.
When Harry and Meghan were dating, the two were driving to have lunch at the Royal Lodge in Windsor, England, where Prince Andrew resides. As they were driving, they learned that the queen was finishing a church service nearby and would be there, as well.
Meghan explained, “I remember Harry and I were in the car and he says, ‘OK, well my grandmother’s going to be there so you’re going to meet her. I said, ‘OK great! I loved my grandmother, I used to take care of my grandmother.’ He goes, ‘Right, do you know how to curtsy?’”
As it turns out, the duchess had no idea that family really curtsied to the queen in private.
“I thought, genuinely, that that was what happens outside. I thought that was part of the fanfare. I didn’t think that’s what happens inside. I said, ‘But it’s your grandmother.’ He goes, ‘It’s the queen.’”
3. Kate Middleton made Meghan cry.
Several months after Meghan and Harry’s wedding, a story broke that Meghan had made her sister-in-law, the former Kate Middleton, cry over a dispute about flower girl dresses. But Meghan said the reality was “the reverse happened.”
“A few days before the wedding, (Kate) was upset about something — the issue was correct, about flower girl dresses — and it made me cry and it really hurt my feelings,” Meghan recalled. “It wasn’t a confrontation, and I don’t think it’s fair to (Kate) to get into the details of that because she apologized and I’ve forgiven her. What was hard to get over was being blamed for something not only I didn’t do but that happened to me and the people who were part of our wedding going to our comms team saying, ‘I know this didn’t happen.'”
She added that Kate gifted her flowers and wrote her an apology note afterwards, calling her “a good person.”
4. Archie’s skin color was an “awkward” conversation.
Meghan, who is half Black, told Winfrey that there were “concerns and conversations” among the royal family ahead of her son Archie’s birth about “how dark his skin might be.”
When Winfrey asked if the issue was that he’d “too brown and that would be a problem,” Meghan explained, “I wasn’t able to follow up with why, but if that’s the assumption you’re making, I think that feels like a pretty safe one.”
Winfrey also asked Prince Harry what concerns his family posed to him about his son’s race.
“That conversation I am never going to share, but at the time it was awkward and I was a bit shocked,” he said. “That was right at the beginning… what will the kids look like?”
5. Meghan has contemplated suicide.
While reflecting on the onslaught of negative press the duchess received since marrying Prince Harry in 2018, the duchess said that it came to a point where the situation felt unsurvivable.
“I just didn’t see a solution,” she told Winfrey. “I just didn’t want to be alive anymore. And that was a very clear and real and frightening constant thought.”
She did eventually tell her husband that she was having suicidal thoughts, saying that what she remembers from the conversation was “how he just cradled me.” The two had to go to an event at the Royal Albert Hall hours later, an outing Harry didn’t think Meghan should attend given her mental state.
“I remember him saying, ‘I don’t think you can go,’ and I said, ‘I can’t be left alone.’”
6. Meghan and Harry didn’t choose not to give Archie a royal title.
The duchess said that while she was pregnant with Archie, born in May 2019, the royal family wanted to change protocol and not offer her son a royal title.
“They didn’t want him to be a prince or princess … which would be different from protocol and that he wasn’t going to receive security,” Meghan said. “I was very scared of having to offer up our baby, knowing that they weren’t going to be kept safe.”
She added that “no explanation” was given about her son not receiving a title. “It’s not their right to take it away,” she said.
7. They’re having a girl!
They revealed their second child together will be a girl! Asked what his reaction was when he found out on the ultrasound, Harry responded, “Amazing. Just grateful.”
“To have any child, any one or any two, would be amazing, but to have a boy and then a girl, what more can you ask for?” He continued. “Now we’ve got our family. We’ve got the four of us and our two dogs, and it’s great.”
8. They’re done having kids.
“Done, two is it,” Meghan told Winfrey, adding that the baby is due in the summer time.
9. The dynamics with Harry’s family shifted after their tour in Australia.
Harry explained that while his family never explicitly acknowledged the racism Meghan faced in the press, his grandmother, father and brother and sister-in-law Kate were all “really welcoming” initially. But “it really changed after the Australia tour,” he said, when they announced Meghan was pregnant for the first time.
“(The tour) was the first time the family got to see how incredible she is at the job, and that brought back memories,” he explained, referencing his mother, the late Princess Diana.
“I just wish that we would all learn from the past but to see how effortless it was for Meghan to come into the family so quickly in Australia and across New Zealand, Figi and Tonga and be able to connect with people,” he said.
10. Money from Princess Diana was used after the royals cut them off.
Prince Harry said that after the royal family cut them off in the first quarter of 2020, he turned to money his mother left him.
“My family literally cut me off financially and I had to afford security for us,” he said, adding, “I have got all what my mum left me. Without that we would not have been able to do this.”
Winfrey asked earlier what he thinks his mom would think of their royal exit, to which he said, “I think she saw it coming. I felt her presence throughout this whole process.”
11. Prince Harry and Prince William don’t seem to be on the best of terms.
As for the relationship between Prince Harry and his brother, Prince William, who is third in line for the throne, the duke said that while he loves his brother, they’re leading different lives now.
“I love William to bits,” he said. “He’s my brother and we’ve been through hell together. We have a shared experience. But we walk different paths.”
Later, when Winfrey pressed him on the subject of his relationship with his brother, he added, “The relationship is space… at the moment. Time heals all things, hopefully.”
