All the Duchess of Sussex’s previous guests have been women, but to close the season she said Prince Harry had encouraged her “to broaden the conversation.”
Archetypes was described in a teaser trailer as a show that “dives into the labels that try to hold women back.”
Meghan said: “Now, if you’ve been listening to the past eleven episodes, you may have noticed that you haven’t heard many men’s voices. In fact, until now, outside of a quick pop-in from my husband in the first episode, this show has featured exclusively women’s voices and that’s by design.
“It was important to us that women have a space to share their authentic and complicated, complex and dynamic experiences. To be heard and to be understood.
“But through that process it also occurred to me, and truth be told at the suggestion of my husband, that if we really want to shift how we think about gender and the limiting labels that we separate people into, then we have to broaden the conversation.
“And we have to actively include men in that conversation and certainly in that effort. So today we are doing just that. We’re opening it all up breaking out of the boxes and the binaries and doing things in a new way.”
Meghan Markle Tells Andy Cohen She Was a Real Housewives Fan
Meghan spoke to Cohen about the success of the Real Housewives franchise, which she said gave TV roles to more than 200 women.
She said: “Well, I will tell you the truth. I stopped watching the Housewives when my life had its own level of drama that I stop craving…”
Cohen finished her sentence by saying: “Other people’s.”
“I would say almost every one of my friends still watches it,” Meghan continued. “And I go, ‘Why are you watching that? There’s so much drama.’
“And it’s because it’s entertainment, it’s entertaining to them and it’s also, I think it’s so familiar because it’s been on for so long, you’ve created an empire.”
Cohen replied: “And I think also we love judging human behavior. And so it’s a way to kind of judge other people’s behaviors in kind of a guilt-free way without, you know, feeling bad about it.”
Meghan also told Cohen he twice turned her down during her early days as an actor, firstly before the Suits pilot had aired and later during its second season.
The duchess said: “I was so eager to be on your show because I was such a Housewives fan at the time and I just couldn’t get booked, Andy.”
He replied: “You know what’s so funny? I had that feeling when basically, we started to kind of forensically, figure out if it was you because we had a sense, we kind of put it together a little.
“We were like, I think she may be a Housewives fan but even worse, Andy, we think we didn’t have her on the show.
“And I was like, oh my God, if it turns out that Megan Markle, actually expressed an interest to be on, Watch What Happens Live? and we, it is now the biggest blunder in the 13 years of the show. So it’s a great story.”
Meghan Markle in Conversation With Trevor Noah
Meghan also spoke with Trevor Noah, who announced he was leaving The Daily Show in September, about South Africa’s system of Apartheid that enforced racial segregation until it was dismantled in the early 1990s.
Meghan said: “Whatever Trevor does next, like all of us, his past is always with him, informing the way that he sees and moves through the world and how he understands all the people in it.
“For Trevor who grew up in a segregated country in a culture dominated by ideals of uber masculinity, almost toxic masculinity, with alarmingly high rates of violence towards women, this all made for a very complex and, as you can imagine, a very nuanced picture.”
Noah said: “One thing I’m eternally grateful to South Africa for and my family for and the society I grew up in is that women always, you know, pursued more. They pursued justice, they pursued equality.
“Our movements in South Africa, our civil rights movement, the fight for freedom, was largely driven by women.
“Many of the men were in exile. Many of the freedom fighters were abroad, either studying or imprisoned and it was many of the women on the ground of the women who were driving the civil rights movement not unlike in America.”
He said men were viewed as the head of the household in South Africa even though many were not physically present, for example, because they had been forced to become migrant workers. He added that views on gender were “reinforced” by “colonial attitudes or the apartheid system itself.”
He said: “My perspectives were shaped because I was with the woman. I lived with my mom predominantly, we couldn’t live with my dad initially, because, you know, he’s a white man and the government didn’t allow that.
“But what that created was a world where myself and my mom were just doing our own thing.”
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