Prince Harry and Meghan Markle announced in 2020 that they were stepping down as senior members of the royal family. By that spring the transition was complete and they were living in Canada before settling in California. Since then they have shared details of what life was really like behind the scenes.
In March 2021 the couple sat down with Oprah Winfrey for a long interview. They spoke about Meghan’s struggles, Harry’s strained family relationships, and their concerns about personal security.
The topic of mental health came up often, and it connected back to Harry’s mother Princess Diana who had also spoken openly about it.
Later that year Harry appeared on the podcast Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard. He was open about his life in the royal family and admitted he had thought about leaving even before meeting Meghan. He said life as a royal felt like a mix of The Truman Show and being in a zoo.
Harry said: “I don’t want this job, I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be doing this. Look what it did to my mom. How am I ever going to settle down and have a wife and family, when I know that it’s gonna happen again? Because I know. I’ve seen behind the curtain. I’ve seen the business model. I know how this operation runs and how it works. I don’t want to be part of this.”
He also explained that being born into the family meant inheriting the risk without any choice.
Harry said: “The biggest issue for me was that being born into it, you inherit the risk. You inherit the risk that comes with it, you inherit every element of it without choice. I think it’s a really dangerous place to be if you don’t have a choice … Then people will, quite rightly, turn around and go, ‘So what if you didn’t have a choice? It was privilege!'”
After marrying Meghan, Harry said she urged him to get therapy. He said: “She saw it. She saw it straight away. She could tell that I was hurting and that some of the stuff that was out of my control was making me really angry. It would make my blood boil. Prior to meeting Meghan, it was very much a case of certainly connected to the media that anger and frustration of, ‘This is so unjust.’ Not just about me, but about all the stuff I was seeing.”
Harry described three times in his life when he felt completely helpless. He said it happened as a child in the car with Diana being chased by paparazzi, when he was in Afghanistan in a helicopter, and later with Meghan. He admitted those moments hurt deeply.
Harry also said that even with his privilege and influence it was not easy to change the institution he was born into. He said: “That’s when you think to yourself … I’ve got the privilege. I’ve got the platform. I’ve got the influence, and even I can’t fix this. I can’t change this. When you start getting in your head about it, that’s when it starts taking a toll.”
