Life has a rather funny habit of bringing you full circle. You spend years moving away from something, convince yourself that chapter has ended, build an entirely different life and then one day find yourself standing almost exactly where you started. Meghan Markle may know that feeling better than most.
Before the titles, royal weddings, interviews, documentaries, podcasts, lifestyle brands and enough newspaper headlines to wallpaper Buckingham Palace, Meghan was an actress. She played Rachel Zane in Suits for seven seasons, building a successful career long before Prince Harry entered the picture.
Then everything changed. She married into the British Royal Family in 2018 and effectively walked away from acting. What followed is probably one of the most public reinventions we’ve witnessed in recent years. Meghan went from actress to Duchess, from working royal to California resident, and then into producing, business ventures and lifestyle programming.
Now, according to Variety, Meghan and Prince Harry are moving back to the U.K., and she is apparently considering a return to acting. Well, there’s an interesting plot twist. But to be fair, Meghan has already dipped her toe back into those waters. Last year she filmed a small cameo in Close Personal Friends, appearing alongside Lily Collins and Brie Larson. It marked her first acting appearance since leaving Suits. And I don’t understand why this should surprise anyone. You would swear that people talk about careers as though people must choose one identity and stick with it forever. You were an actress, then you became a royal, therefore you cannot possibly become an actress again. Really?
The simple truth is that people change careers all the time. They leave jobs, start businesses, discover that the grass on the other side isn’t as green as they thought and occasionally return to something they once loved. Meghan just happens to do all of that while millions of strangers analyse every decision without a second thought. Sadly for her there is also no escaping the enormous curiosity that would surround her return. Can you possibly imagine the first trailer?
You wouldn’t simply be watching Meghan Markle playing a character. You would be looking for clues in every facial expression, line of dialogue and storyline about whether she’s secretly talking about the Royal Family. The magnitude of this forensic examination would be enormous. I mean, she could play a dentist from Manchester and somebody somewhere would still produce a 47-minute YouTube video explaining why the root canal represents Buckingham Palace.
Unfortunately, that’s the baggage that comes with becoming more famous for your life than your work. And perhaps that will be Meghan’s biggest challenge if she seriously returns to acting. Can audiences separate Meghan the actress from Meghan the Duchess of Sussex? Before all the controversy surrounding her name, she had already spent years building an acting career. I hardly think that Suits became successful because one of its cast members married a prince. Meghan was seen as a good actress long before anybody knew what was coming. And if she returns now, audiences need
to see her that way again.
And I actually find something rather human about that. We spend so much of our lives believing that moving forward means never looking backwards. But sometimes going back doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve failed to move on. Sometimes you simply discover that something you left behind still belongs to you. Whether Meghan Markle can successfully return to acting remains to be seen. The entertainment industry she left behind has changed, and so has she. But perhaps the bigger challenge won’t be convincing Hollywood to give her another role. It will be convincing the world to watch Meghan Markle on screen and see a character instead of Meghan Markle.
And after everything that’s happened over the past eight years, that may be her most difficult role yet.
