What We Learned from Oprah’s Interview with Harry and Meghan: Live Updates

That spring I remember walking around Black London neighborhoods that were tuning into the royal soap opera for the first time, with hope and a bit of apprehension.

“It’s a big deal that they’re allowing it,” an office manager told me. “Maybe they’re allowing it in the hope that it doesn’t work, so they can say, ‘well, we let it happen, and this is what came of it.”

Britain remains 87 percent white, but the number of Britons identifying themselves as mixed-race has been growing fast, and may already make up the largest single minority group in the country. In the 1990s, when many Britons were questioning the value of the monarchy, research showed that those doubts were strongest among the young and racial minority groups, parts of the population not represented by the institution.

And that was that.

Meghan had surrendered her keys, driver’s license and passport upon joining the family. “I couldn’t, you know, call an Uber to the palace,” she said.

On one occasion in 2018, Meghan said, she attended an official event at the Royal Albert Hall against Harry’s advice because she feared what she might do to herself if she were left alone. She sobbed in the royal box of the concert hall, smiling and posing for photographs when the lights were turned on.

Meghan described being scared by thoughts “in the middle of the night that are very clear,” and said: “This isn’t some abstract idea. This is methodical, and this is not who I am.”

Harry has spoken out about his own struggles with mental health issues, describing years of panic attacks in a 2017 interview with a podcast made by The Telegraph. He came “very close to total breakdown on numerous occasions, when all sorts of grief and lies and misconceptions are coming to you from every angle,” he said.

In 2019, he and Oprah announced a documentary about “mental illness and mental wellness,” which is to air on Apple TV+ later this year.

Harry later said mental health had played a key role in his decision to redefine his role in the family.

“It’s really sad that it’s gotten to this point, but I’ve got to do something for my own mental health, my wife’s, and for Archie’s, as well, because I could see where this was headed,” he said.

If you are having thoughts of suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 (TALK) or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.

The speech was broadcast on Sunday for Commonwealth Day, a celebration of countries largely from the former British Empire that continue to maintain ties with Britain.

The queen’s remarks came just hours before a highly anticipated televised appearance of her grandson Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, with Oprah Winfrey on Sunday night. Relations between the couple and the royal family have been strained since the duke and duchess announced they would step back from their official duties and move to North America.

The annual Commonwealth Day service at Westminster Abbey in London, which the royal family typically attends, was canceled this year because of the pandemic.

After a highly contagious variant ravaged Britain over the winter and the country tightened restrictions, confirmed cases in Britain have steadily ticked down, according to a New York Times database.

Public support dipped in the 1990s, after the bitter public divorce of her heir, Prince Charles, from Diana, Princess of Wales. Ordinary Britons felt increasingly alienated from a “privileged, inward-looking, inbred royal family that was obviously dysfunctional,” the political scientist Mark Leonard once told me.

New energy came in the form of the two princes — charismatic, emotionally open young men who seemed more closely connected to the lives of ordinary Britons.

Prince Harry, in particular, expressed a clear desire to live more like Scandinavian royals, who hold jobs and do their own shopping. His marriage to a biracial American woman engaged a new population — younger, more urban and more diverse — in the future of the monarchy.

But conservative monarchists recoiled against these modernizing impulses long before Prince Harry’s ambivalence reached a crisis point. They may have won this round, with his public estrangement from the family, but a long-term problem emerges: How can the royals win back young Britain?

“Really?” Oprah asked.

“Just the three of us,” Harry said.

“Just the three of us,” Meghan added.

Anticipation of Sunday’s interview has revived that comparison, with online commentators noting the resemblance of Meghan’s black-and-white Armani dress to one of that rs. Simpson wore in a 1936 portrait.

In fact, as Anne Sebba wrote in her 2011 biography, “That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor,” the trauma of the abdication secured important new freedoms for members of the royal family, persuading Britons to accept that they had the right to pursue their own personal happiness, even in the face of tradition.

Queen Elizabeth’s family has made good use of that principle: Three of her four children, including the future king, are divorced. Her grandchildren were free to marry as they wished.

As for Mrs. Simpson and the Duke of Windsor, they would spend the rest of their lives trying to recreate the royal life they left behind when he abdicated the throne in 1936, poring over slights and rejections. The Duke’s relationship with his brother, George VI, never recovered. In 1970, the couple gave their own tell-all interview to the BBC.

“We’ve been very happy,” Mrs. Simpson said, and the Duke grabbed her hand, as if to demonstrate. “We have,” he agreed.

“About how dark your baby is going to be?” asked Oprah.

“Potentially,” said Meghan, “and what that would mean or look like.”

She declined to name anyone on the other side of the conversation: “I think that would be very damaging to them.”

“They were concerned that if he were too brown, that that would be a problem?” Oprah asked.

“I wasn’t able to follow up with why,” said Meghan “but that — if that’s the assumption you’re making, I think that feels like a pretty safe one.”

Shortly after Harry’s entry into the televised conversation, Oprah asked him about what had been said.

“That conversation I’m never going to share,” Harry said. “At the time, it was awkward. I was a bit shocked.”

“Can you tell us what the question was?” Oprah asked.

“No,” said Harry. “I’m not comfortable with sharing that.”

He went on to say that the subject of future children’s appearance was raised even before their wedding.

“There were some real obvious signs before we even got married that this was going to be really hard.”

In 2018, Meghan’s and Harry’s royal wedding with all the trappings (plus some new ones, like a sermon from a Chicago-born Black bishop) was heralded by many as a sign the royal family was tip-toeing toward modernization.

Why, Oprah had asked Meghan, did the royal family express reluctance to eventually grant Archie, the grandson of the future sovereign, the title of “prince”?

“Do you think it’s because of his race?” Oprah asked.

Meghan’s answer left little doubt of her assessment.

Elsewhere in the interview, Harry identified missed “opportunities for my family to show some public support” of Meghan in the face of racist coverage. He mentioned an open letter, signed by 72 women in Britain’s Parliament, condemning the “outdated, colonial undertones” in newspaper coverage of Meghan.

“Yet no one from my family ever said anything over those three years,” he said. “And that — that hurts. But I also am acutely aware of where my family stand and how scared they are of the tabloids turning on them.”

The couple first met at Soho House in London in 2016 after a friend set them up on a blind date. They married in 2018 and remained in London until late 2019.

In the first months of their relationship, a network of friends worked to help them keep it private, but eventually the global press found out they were together. Since then, their relationship has been complicated.

Throughout the course of their relationship, the couple has had to endure scrutiny from the news media, particularly in Britain, where they sued the tabloids that revealed letters shared between Ms. Markle and her father ahead of her wedding to Prince Harry.

In the most recent example, The Sunday Times of London reported Sunday that Meghan once “went mental” at a shooting weekend in Sandringham, one of the Queen’s country properties, because the “personally embroidered” blankets she had ordered for her and Harry’s guests arrived in the wrong shade of red.

To Harry and his media-savvy bride, it made perfect sense to overhaul that arrangement: Like many celebrities, they felt they now had the upper hand. Social media is, slowly but surely, edging out the print press. The Sussexes could release their baby photos over Instagram, rather than trot out their newborn to a ritual maternity-ward press pack.

But other royals disagree.

The British papers often give the royals rough treatment, paying off their school friends to dish dirt or castigating them as lazy, frumpy and self-indulgent. But they are a direct line to the monarchy’s most devoted fan base, and are unafraid to use that power to damage reputations — of individual family members, or of the institution as a whole.

“This is the shattering of a tradition that goes back for decades,” a senior journalist told me in 2019, when Meghan and Harry refused to pose for the traditional photo op with newborn Archie. “There is a price to be paid for that, and the price is mockery.”

It was going to be a dress with purpose. A dress that would set a tone. A dress that would, after all, be seen and re-seen as the photos from the interview went around the world and down in royal history, much as the photos of Princess Diana in her black jacket looking up from under her bangs at Martin Bashir in her 1995 BBC interview still appear whenever the topic of that royal divorce comes up.

And the answer is … a $4,700 black silk wrap dress by Giorgio Armani with a white lotus flower print spilling down one shoulder.

According to Town & Country’s royal whisperer, Ms. Markle chose the dress specifically because of the lotus flower symbolism, and the fact the bloom represents rebirth, which was part of what the interview was also supposed represent: The rebirth of Harry and Meghan as an independent entity, authentically themselves apart from the royal family; the rebirth of their voices. Plus, of course, the coming birth of the couple’s next child. Oh — and also the fact that, wrote T & C, the lotus can “flourish despite seemingly challenging conditions.”

Hint, hint.

Though there is some irony in a very expensive dress being chosen to partly represent the wearer’s victimhood and resilience in the face of pain.

Still, worn belted over her pregnant stomach, with spiky black Aquazzura heels and a diamond Cartier tennis bracelet that was once owned by Princess Diana (chosen so that, the couple told Ms. Winfrey, she could be there with them), it was not exactly your run-of-the-mill maternity look.

Not exactly a “Royals! They’re just like us!” kind of thing. Not even a: “Hey, we’re now in America and we’re going to use all this attention to help an American designer,” kind of thing. Not even an eco-sensitive, or support-the-outsiders kind of thing. (All kinds of things that had been part of Ms. Markle’s public image-making before.)

More of a high glamour, celebrity kind of thing. Armani was the first high fashion designer to ever woo the Hollywood set; the go-to name for stars in search of “style but make it safe,” and for studio execs looking to seem serious but not stuffy. (When asked how he felt about Ms. Markle choosing his dress for the big interview, Mr. Armani emailed, “It’s hard for me to comment about Meghan’s choice seeing it’s a dress from my collection.”)

And that made it also a “this is my choice because now I am free to make my own choices and I don’t have to think about diplomacy or fulfilling the expectations of all the people who have pinned their hopes on me as an agent of change,” kind of thing. (That’s a heavy thing, admittedly.)

It’s the kind of thing that Diana wore too, post-divorce, when she declared independence partly by favoring high-octane European designers. And the kind of thing, perhaps unfortunately, that Wallis Simpson might have worn when she and Edward went into exile; Mrs. Simpson as well seemed to find solace in high fashion.

Still, Prince Harry did not exactly do an Edward. For the interview he was wearing a dove gray J. Crew Ludlow suit — jacket $425; pants, $225 — along with a simple white shirt, unbuttoned at the throat, and no tie. It looked an awful lot like the suit he wore for his first Baby Archie photo-op back in May of 2019, and it ticked all sorts of boxes. Accessible! American! Possibly shopping his closet, which is better for the planet. He may not have realized his clothes contained all that, but his wife probably did.

All in all, a good thing, really.

It was as if she had set fire to Buckingham Palace. She had long surreptitiously leaked details of her unhappy plight to favored tabloid journalists; this was the first time she had taken the bold step of declaring herself publicly. Watching a woman who had been so silent speak out about an institution that commands respect in part because of its mystery — at the time, the British public had never seen anything like it.

“I have one friend who’s bringing scones from a local bakery, and I was going to go to Whole Foods and peruse their selections for any British-themed food,” she said. To accompany the scones, she has a Royal Wedding tea towel that bears the image of the couple from what now seems a more innocent time.

Alexis Barber, 22, who just graduated, oversaw recruitment at Northwestern’s Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority, the same position Markle held during her pre-royalty days as a double major in theater and international studies.

“I was in London when they announced their engagement, which was a crazy coincidence, and I just always felt connected with her because we are both mixed and it was still at the time pretty rare to be Black in Greek life,” said Ms. Barber.

Tonight, she is opting for wine and cheese for the interview.

“This is my Super Bowl,” said Ms. Barber, who intends to take to Instagram during the show to share with friends what she called her Markle obsession. “I just need to know what’s going on.”

In response, the palace, said that it has “a dignity at work policy” in place and “does not and will not tolerate bullying or harassment in the workplace.”

Were these allegations publicly aired at this particular time, more than two years after the fact, in order to discredit the Duchess or neutralize her potential complaints before her interview with Oprah?

You be the judge.

In a recent interview with James Corden, Harry said he hasn’t had much a chance to see Los Angeles because he, Meghan and Archie have been at home under lockdown. He also said he has been on Zoom calls with his grandparents, Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip. They’ve also been making a lot of organic waffles with the waffle maker the Queen sent Archie for Christmas.

In September they announced that they’d founded a production company and signed a multiyear deal with Netflix; in December they announced that they inked a deal with Spotify to produce podcast through their organization, Archewell. But this weekend’s Oprah interview is their first major piece of content to be released this year.