Prince Harry And Meghan Markle Have Never Said They Want Privacy

So you see, for the Sussexes, it’s never been about privacy — they’ve never wanted to step out of the spotlight. They’ve just wanted control over where it points.

As working members of the royal family, Harry and Meghan were powerless in many ways when it came to shaping their public narrative. As we know from the Oprah interview, they had to play the media game according to the royal family’s rules, staying silent when they would’ve rather spoken out. They were obligated to share parts of their lives with the public via an established system of Palace-approved reporters known as the “royal rota” and compelled to participate in such rituals as the ceremonial presenting of the royal baby to the cameras. They had to seek approval for everything, always with the understanding that their wants and needs were of lesser importance than those of the sovereign and direct heirs to the throne — not to mention the preservation of the monarchy. (Indeed, Meghan told Oprah that the top royal bureaucrats “were willing to lie to protect other members of the family, but they weren’t willing to tell the truth to protect me and my husband.”)

Outside of the royal system, the Sussexes can do what they want. They have the ability to, as Meghan referenced, choose one photo from the camera roll to share with the world — without consultation or approval from a higher power. And that’s what they’re doing with the Harry & Meghan Netflix docuseries.

The Sussexes aren’t just the subjects of the show. They produced it. You can draw your own conclusions about how much control they had over the finished product. (Meghan made a point of distancing her husband and herself from the process in a recent Variety interview.) But let’s be serious here. There’s absolutely no world in which they’re going to be unhappy with the docuseries when it starts streaming next week. There’s no way they haven’t seen it and given it their seal of approval. They’ve had control over it from start to finish.

And that control over the narrative is what they’ve always wanted.

One of the first things they did upon officially leaving royal life was settle scores — they famously cut off those UK tabloids they felt had covered them unfairly (and abusively) during their time as working royals.

Since then, the Sussexes have wielded their newfound power over the public’s perception of their lives with an iron fist. The select number of chosen outlets that have been granted interviews with the couple have been conducted by, for the most part, questioners who declined to challenge them on anything. Harry told the story of his mental health journey in a docuseries he coproduced with Oprah for Apple+ titled The Me You Can’t See (and, as I noted at the time, the version of his life he told was slightly different from what he’s said about his life in the past.)

But Harry & Meghan is the first time that the Sussexes will be able to tell their story from beginning to end, entirely in their own words. They’ll finally be able to make their case to the public and “correct the record” as they were unable to do when it was actually happening.

“When the stakes are this high, doesn’t it make more sense to hear our story from us?” Meghan asks in the docuseries trailer.

The stakes are high indeed. Let’s see what the Sussexes do with this total control of their narrative.