Meghan Markle Was Told to ‘Suck It In’ as a Briefcase Model on TV Show: “I Will Never Forget…”

Meghan Markle’s path to fame wasn’t all bright lights and glamour. In an incredibly candid podcast episode , she accounted for young career struggles as a briefcase model on the extremely popular Deal or No Deal game show. In 2006, Markle was a young actress struggling to get her big break in Hollywood, and the game show provided financial stability and health benefits but at an emotional cost. She got candid about her time on the show in raw, unfiltered detail on her Archetypes podcast . “I was thankful for the job, but not for how it made me feel, which was not smart,” Markle confessed.

The show’s premise was simple yet objectifying. 25 women were stationed on stage, holding briefcases, awaiting contestants to call them. Their primary job was to look hot, an idea that quite bothered Markle to the core. “And when I look back at that time, I will never forget this one detail,” she mentioned on her podcast. In her mind, one backstage moment spoke volumes of the toxic culture.

“Moments before we’d get onstage, there was a woman who ran the show,” Markle remembered. “She couldn’t properly pronounce my last name at the time and I knew who she was talking to because she’d go, ‘Markle, suck it in! Markle, suck it in!'” — a comment that really underlined the intense pressure to conform to rigid body image standards. Preparing for each episode was equally demoralizing. Markle described stations for applying fake eyelashes , hair extensions, and weekly spray tans. “There was a very cookie-cutter idea of precisely what we should look like,” she said. “It was solely about beauty and not necessarily about brains.”

This was a far cry from her previous experience as an intern at the U.S. embassy in Argentina, where she felt appreciated for her intellect. “Here, I was being valued for something quite the opposite,” she said. Surrounded by intelligent women, Markle was frustrated that her potential was being wasted on mere visual entertainment. “I was surrounded by smart women on that stage with me, but that wasn’t the focus of why we were there,” she explained. “…knowing that I was so much more than what was being objectified on the stage. I didn’t like feeling forced to be all looks and little substance, and that’s how it felt for me at the time — being reduced to this specific archetype,” as per Today .

The pervasive objectification made an indelible mark on Markle. It ultimately led her to leave the show in 2007. Now a mom, Markle reflected upon that chapter with greater insight. She said she wanted her daughter, Lilibet, to appreciate herself more than just her outward physical appearance. “I want our daughters to aspire to be slightly higher. Yeah, I want my Lili to want to be educated and want to be smart and to pride herself on those things,” she shared, as per Cosmopolitan.