Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s highly-anticipated Netflix documentary has finally landed, and it’s giving us an insight into how the royals behave behind closed doors.
In episode two, Meghan Markle recalls the first time she met Prince William and Kate when the pair came over for dinner – and it turns out they are not huggers.
“Even when Will and Kate came over, I met her for the first time… I remember I was in ripped jeans and I was barefoot,” Meghan recalls.
“I was a hugger, always a big hugger, and I didn’t realise that’s really jarring for a lot of Brits.
“I guess I started to understand very quickly that the formality on the outside carried through on the inside. That there is a forward-facing way of being and then you close the door and [Meghan exhales]...and say ‘Oh good, we can relax now.’ But that formality carries over on both sides, and that was surprising to me.”
She also adds that the Queen was the first senior member of the royal family that she met, but she didn’t know the meeting was going to take place until minutes before it happened.
The Duchess of Sussex recalls sitting in the car with Prince Harry and being told she’d be meeting his grandmother.
“He said: ’You know how to curtsy right? And I just thought it was a joke,” she laughs.
Harry adds: “How do you explain to people that you bow to your grandmother? And that you will need to curtsy? Especially to an American, it’s weird.”
The first three episodes of Harry and Meghan’s series have dropped on Netflix.
The series began with a written statement on a black background saying it is a “first hand account of Harry & Meghan’s story told with never before seen personal archive”.
It said all interviews were finished in August 2022 and “members of the Royal Family declined to comment on the content within this series”.
In the opening scenes, Harry is shown at Heathrow airport in footage he filmed himself in March 2020 at the culmination of the ‘Megxit crisis’, as he prepared to leave the UK for the last time as a senior royal.
“This is about duty and service and I feel as though, being part of this family, it is my duty to uncover this exploitation and bribery that happens within our media,” he says.
Meghan is seen separately, filming herself in Vancouver wearing a towel on her head and saying: “Unfortunately, in us standing for something, they are destroying us.”