Parisa Fitz-Henley wasn’t one of those royal-watchers tracking every development in Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’swhirlwind romance. But in November, when her friends were abuzz about the BBC interview Markle and Harry gave after their engagement, the actress decided to give it a watch.
“I was very taken with them, and thought that Meghan was so intriguing,” Fitz-Henley told Vanity Fair last week, sitting inside the lounge of the Peninsula hotel in Beverly Hills.
The engagement interview showed Meghan, an actress and activist best known for her role on USA Network’s legal drama Suits, as poised, articulate, and seemingly more comfortable in front of the camera than her fiancé. It was a surprising and refreshing juxtaposition to the engagement interview Prince William and Kate Middleton gave in 2010, when the future king played lead to the (understandably) nervous Middleton.
Fitz-Henley was so impressed by Markle that she contacted her manager and alerted her that, if Hollywood were to eventually make a movie about the future princess, she wanted to audition. Just three weeks later, Fitz-Henley’s phone rang.
“Lo and behold, here we are,” laughed Fitz-Henley, best known for playing Reva Connors in Luke Cage and Jessica Jones.
The Jamaican-American actress turned and smiled at the Harry to her Meghan, Murray Fraser, sitting beside her. The casting of their upcoming Lifetime movie, Harry & Meghan: A Royal Romance, is so spot-on that, in conversation, Fitz-Henley and Fraser are a lot like their real-life counterparts in that engagement interview. Fraser, who is Scottish and grew up in a roughhousing household as one of four boys, offered the easy, lighthearted asides to Fitz-Murray’s elegant lead.
To play Prince Harry, Fraser—not much of a royal-watcher either—dyed his hair red, perused Harry interviews on the Internet, and banished his Scottish accent for the entire five-week shoot, keeping up his royal British even between takes, on the advice of director Menhaj Huda.
Fitz-Henley, meanwhile, did a deep dive on her character—poring over Markle’s interviews, her late lifestyle blog, the Tig, and her acting reel. She also finally got into that itsy-bitsy palace period drama the world has been raving about: “I became obsessed with The Crown, like everybody else.”
“I still haven’t watched it,” interjected Fraser.
“You need to,” Fitz-Henley insisted, before returning to her point. “I watched it and I thought, ‘Wow, this is a really intriguing family.’ It was also a reminder of the things that we’re doing as well [with Harry & Meghan], which is showing that these public figures are just people. You can have titles, but at the end of the day, [being a royal] is your job. Deep down, you’re a human being with feelings and shortcomings and insecurities and dreams.”
The film addresses various obstacles in the couple’s courtship—the difficulties of transatlantic dating, Markle’s decision to leave Suits and shutter her lifestyle blog, and even the distasteful criticism that some of Markle’s own step-family members have offered up to tabloids. In it, Markle herself keeps her head above the family fracas, not commenting on the drama. The Lifetime movie, which imagines what went on between Harry and Meghan behind closed doors, sympathetically lets Meghan the person, not the public figure, offer her (imagined) side of the situation.
“She’s such a well-rounded human being,” insisted Fitz-Henley, eager to dispel the two-dimensionality of any “fairy-tale princess” narrative. “This is a woman who studied international relations right alongside theater; who very easily could have become a diplomat instead of an actor. The fact that she’s being given a larger stage on which to share the stories of other people, convey people’s experiences to a large audience . . . I don’t feel like she has left anything as much as she has transitioned into this new phase.”
As Vanity Fair’s Josh Duboffreported in last month’s royals issue, the fact that Markle was able to make such a seismic transition—geographically, professionally, and publicly—without many details about her personal life leaking is a testament to her tight-lipped circle of friends. The circle is so tight, in fact, that Fitz-Henley did not even realize that she and the real-life Markle had one very good friend in common until after beginning the film. But that did not mean that Fitz-Henley pressed the mutual relation for details.
“This is somebody who I love and have super-deep conversations with, but she’s not talking about her friend, and I wouldn’t ask about her either. There’s a respect among women, a sisterhood in my circle of friends that I really appreciate. When I found out we had this mutual close friend in common, I knew Meghan must be a good girl and cool, because this person is good and cool.”
The friend, who is also an actress, will be at the royal wedding this month.
“I’m going to look at all the close-up pictures after,” smiled Fitz-Henley.
The faux Meghan is enough of a realist to know that she probably won’t be getting up at four A.M. to watch the royal wedding on May 19, and real Meghan likely won’t have the time to watch the Harry & Meghan Lifetime movie on May 13, given that it premieres just six days before said wedding.
“At the end of the day, she’s getting married,” said Fitz-Henley. “I know personally that I don’t even have time to watch commercials.”
“I would watch a highlight reel,” joked Fraser. “A shorter version, two and a half minutes, going back, I mean, ‘I do, I do.’”
Fitz-Henley and Fraser are in the minority, though. British royal weddings historically translate to ravenous viewership, as attested by the 750 million people who watched Diana and Charles’s 1981 wedding. And with Harry & Meghan: A Royal Romance, Lifetime is gambling that the world, salivating over Harry-and-Meghan content, will gobble up a fantasy glimpse behind closed palace doors a week before the big event. And though Fitz-Henley may not be among them, there is an important royal-watching relative in her life: “My grandmother is the biggest fan of anything British, so she was thrilled [I got this part]. She’ll definitely be watching everything.”
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