Megan Markle has unveiled the debut episode of her long-awaited podcast Archetypes, featuring an impressive A-lister as her first guest.
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex signed a multi-million dollar deal with Spotify in 2020, with Meghan announcing earlier this year that she would be exploring female stereotypes and “labels that try to hold women back” as part of her first audio series.
On Tuesday, Meghan finally unveiled the first instalment of the long-awaited project, featuring her good friend Serena Williams.
In the hour-long episode, titled The Misconception Of Ambition, Meghan and Serena discuss the early years of their friendship, being ambitious as children and the double-standards that Serena has faced throughout her tennis career.
Asked by the host what made her want to be her inaugural podcast guest, Serena insisted: “Because I love you! Anything you want me to do I’m going to do. I believe in you.
“We’ve been friends for so long. I’m super loyal, you know that.”
Later in the conversation, Meghan shared an account of an incident that happened when she and Prince Harry were on their tour of South Africa, to illustrate a point about not knowing what people are going through privately.
“Archie [Meghan and Harry’s son] was four and a half months old, and the moment we landed we had to drop him off at that this housing unit they had us staying in,” she recalled.
“He was going to get ready to go down for his nap, and we immediately went to this official engagement… We finished 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?
“So we’re in the car, we had just landed an hour or two before, racing back, and our amazing nanny Lauren, who we had all the way until we [got to] Canada, here… she was in floods of tears. She was supposed to put Archie down for his nap and she said, ‘you know what? Let me just get a snack downstairs’… her instinct was, ‘let me take him with me before we put him down’.
“In that amount of time that she went downstairs, the heater in the nursery caught fire. There was no smoke detector, someone happened to just smell smoke, went in, fire extinguished. He was supposed to be sleeping in there! And we came back, and of course as a mother you go, ‘oh my god…’, everyone’s in tears, everyone’s shaken.”
Meghan added: “And what did we have to do? Go out and do another official engagement. I said, ‘this doesn’t make any sense! Can you just tell people what happened?’. And so much, I think optically, the focus ends up on being on how it looks instead of how it feels.”
In a teaser for the podcast in March, Meghan explained: “This is how we talk about women: the words that raise our girls, and how the media reflects women back to us… but where do these stereotypes come from? And how do they keep showing up and defining our lives?
“This is Archetypes – the podcast where we dissect, explore, and subvert the labels that try to hold women back.
“I’ll have conversations with women who know all too well how these typecasts shape our narratives. And I’ll talk to historians to understand how we even got here in the first place.”