The Duchess of Sussex has said she was treated like a “bimbo” during her 34-show stint on Deal or No Deal.
The former actor appeared on the show 16 years ago when she was starting out in her career onscreen, and discussed the gig with Paris Hilton in a new episode of her podcast, Archetypes.
Meghan Markle said that while she was grateful for the work, she didn’t like how it made her feel, which was “not smart”.
Speaking of her and the Duke of Sussex’s one-year-old daughter Lilibet, Meghan said: “I want our daughter 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.”
Meghan left NBC’s Deal or No Deal midway through the season in 2006.
She explained: “I ended up quitting the show. 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 the word bimbo.”
The 41-year-old explained that other women were forced to “line up” for beauty treatments, including having their bras padded and getting fake eyelashes.
“We were even given spray-tan vouchers each week because there was a very cookie cutter idea of precisely what we should look like. It was solely about our beauty,” Meghan said.
She added: “I was surrounded by smart women on that stage with me, but that wasn’t the focus of why we were there and I would end up leaving with this pit in my stomach. Like I said, I was thankful for the job but not for how it made me feel, which was not smart.”
Maeghan said that there were times when she was working on the game show that she would “back to my time working as an intern at the U.S. Embassy in Argentina, Buenos Aires, and being in the motorcade with the secretary of treasury at the time and being valued specifically for my brain”.
In last week’s episode of the podcast, Meghan said that she had been “conditioned” not to show emotion in public.
