The wait is finally over. Meghan Markle has dropped the first episode of her highly anticipated podcast, Archetypes, which features a candid, in-depth chat with her long-time friend, Serena Williams.
Markle promised her listeners that the podcast would reveal the unfiltered, “real me”—and going by the first episode, she wasn’t lying.
The podcast discusses “the labels and tropes that try to hold women back,” Markle explained.
“Over the course of the next dozen episodes, we’re going to live inside and rip apart the boxes women have been placed into for generations—boxes like diva, crazy, the B-word, slut. Some of these words—these labels—are harsh; they’re abrasive. And I want to get to the bottom of where they come from, why they’ve stuck around for so long, and—importantly—how we can move past them.”
Upon its launch, the Duchess released a striking new portrait of herself to front the podcast. In it, Markle wears a plain white tank top, with her hair loose and her makeup natural. She’s nothing if not consistent.
Below, we’ve rounded up five things we learned from the first episode.
The fire in Archie’s nursery
During the podcast, Markle and Serena Williams talk candidly about motherhood and the challenges they’ve encountered since welcoming their children (the royal welcomed her first child Archie in 2019 and her second, Lillibet in 2021. Serena has a four-year-old daughter, Alexis Olympia).
At one point, Markle reveals that while she and husband Prince Harry went on a royal tour of South Africa—prior to their royal exit—a fire had broken out in Archie’s nursery. Their son, who was only four months old at the time, was luckily out of the room.
“He was supposed to be sleeping in there,” she explained.
Despite the terrifying situation, Harry and Meghan were required to continue the tour business as normal.
“The focus ends up being on how it looks instead of how it feels,” Meghan explained. “And part of the humanising and the breaking through of these labels and these archetypes and these boxes that we’re put into is having some understanding on the human moments behind the scenes that people might not have any awareness of and to give each other a break.
“Because we did — we had to leave our baby.”
How she met Serena Williams
Markle and Williams’ friendship is common knowledge, but they rarely talk about the origins of said friendship. That all changed when they got together for the podcast. As they got comfortable, Meghan revisited their first encounter.
“It was the same year that the Super Bowl was in New York,” she explained. “I’d never been it before and then I show up and I see you walking toward someone. I remember thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, who is Serena Williams going to talk to?'”
“I looked behind me and when I turned around, you were there right in front of me…We became such fast friends,” she said.
Williams explained how their connection has only strengthened over time.
“We have a lot in common,” she told the royal, to which Markle replied: “In our friendship, when you have to see things that are mischaracterising of me, but you experience behind closed doors the pain that I’m going through, and vice versa.”
Serena Williams expands on her decision to retire from tennis
Earlier this month, Serena Williams announce her intention to retire from tennis in the coming weeks. During her candid chat with Markle, she gave some more context about how she came to the decision.
“Obviously I’m retiring professionally, but it’s also an evolution,” she began.
“I’m doing more business things. And I really want to expand my family. And, you know, I’ve been putting it off for so long. And as a woman, there’s only so, so long you can put that off.”
Markle and Williams’ childhood motivation
The pair also discussed how their childhoods—and their powerful motivation to be a trailblazer—were alike.
They note that when Williams was just 11 years old, she was asked which tennis player she would most like to emulate—Williams said she wants others to be like herself.
Markle brought up the famous story of how she penned a powerful letter to the TV regulator to call out a sexist advertisement, and asked for it to be changed. She was 11 years old at the time.
“Both of us at 11 years old, growing up in LA, that was the time that I found a commercial to be sexist. And I wrote the letters and that commercial got changed. That’s the same time you at 11 years old, when someone says if you were a tennis player, who would you want to be like? And you said I’d want other people to be like me,” Markle said in the podcast.
“So there was something we obviously didn’t know each other then, but what was it about our 11 year old selves?
“When you’re young, I find you’re so innocent, but you’re also so fearless. Right? And somehow as we get older, because of these archetypes, because of what society’s doing, because of the pressure of the media, because of all this noise, I don’t think that we’re as fearless as we were then,” she added.
More insight on Meghan’s royal exit
Details around Harry and Meghan’s royal exit in 2020 have been unpacked, sensationalised and, for want of a better phrased, done to death by global media. So Markle’s new admission about the bombshell moment during her new podcast provided a new perspective on the pair’s decision.
Speaking about the pressures of royal life, she said she and Harry were well aware of the complexities the move pose—but they had to choose what was best for their family.
“I think, you know, I think both of us, or the three of us, really know that sometimes the right decision isn’t the easiest decision”.
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