In recent months, much was made of the fact that Meghan Markle and Prince Harry had not produced any content for Spotify, despite signing a lucrative deal with the streaming giant back in 2020.
But today, the Sussexes silenced their critics when they debuted their long-awaited Archetypes podcast.
And fans who were hoping that Meg would spill some tea about her royal in-laws were surely not disappointed by the premiere episode.
For starters, Meghan was joined by one of the most famous of her A-list friends — recently-retired tennis legend Serena Williams.
The Duchess kicked things off by informing listeners that they can expect a much more candid version of Meghan that they’ve known up to this point.,
“People should expect the real me in this, and probably the me that they’ve never gotten to know — certainly not in the past few years, where everything is through the lens of the media as opposed to, ‘Hey, it’s me,’” she said.
“I’m just excited to be myself and talk and be unfiltered and…yeah, it’s fun,”
On Instagram, Serena seemed every bit as enthusiastic about the project as Meghan.
“I loved talking about so many important topics with my dear friend Meghan as her first guest on #archetypes for @spotify!” Williams captioned a photo featuring Meghan and her daughter, Olympia.
“It’s out now and worth the listen, especially if you’re ambitious.”
And talk about important topics, they did!
At one point, Meghan recalled a bit of royal trauma that she endured that she did not reveal in her controversial interview with Oprah.
It all went down in 2019 when Meg and Harry embarked on a royal tour of South Africa with baby Archie in tow.
“Archie was what, four and a half months old? And the moment we landed, we had to drop him off at this housing unit that they had had us staying in,” the Duchess said.
“He was going to get ready to go down for his nap.”
The trip was going according to plan — until Meghan and Harry received the scare of a lifetime.,.
“We immediately went to an official engagement in this township called Nyanga, and there was this moment where I’m standing on a tree stump and I’m giving this speech to women and girls, and we finish the engagement, we get in the car and they say there’s been a fire at the residence. What? There’s been a fire in the baby’s room. What?”
“And so we’re in the car. We had just landed, what, an hour or 2 hours before racing back? We get back … Our amazing nanny, Lauren, who we’d had all the way until, in Canada here … Lauren in floods of tears,” Meghan recalled.
“She was supposed to put Archie down for his nap and she just said, ‘You know what? Let me just go get a snack downstairs.’
“And she was from Zimbabwe and we loved that she would always tie him on her, her back with a mud cloth, and her instinct was like, Let me just bring him with me before I put him down,” the Duchess explained.
“In that amount of time that she went downstairs,” Meghan continued, “the heater in the nursery caught on fire. There was no smoke detector.”
Meghan recalled coming home to a very shaken household — and then being forced to go back to work:
“And we came back. And of course, as a mother, you go, Oh, my God, what? Everyone’s in tears, everyone’s shaken. And what do we have to do? Go out and do another official engagement? I said, ‘This doesn’t make any sense.’”
Meghan adds that in addition to being urged to continue the tour, she was discouraged from telling anyone about the trauma she had just endured.
“I was like, ‘Can you just tell people what happened?’ And so much, I think, optically, the focus ends up being on how it looks instead of how it feels,” she recalled.
According to Newsweek, at the time, a royal quoted source claimed that the couple “hope to be able to include Archie at some point in the program, but it is difficult to schedule because he is 5 months old.”
But Meghan says she and Harry were forced to continually leave Archie behind.
“We had to leave our baby and even though we were being moved to another place afterwards, we still had to leave him and go do another official engagement,” she said.
Meghan never named names or directly shaded any royals.
But we think it’s safe to say the Queen and company are probably less than pleased with the Duchess’ Spotify debut!
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