Now as a successful actress and future Duchess, Meghan Markle is a household name. The 36-year-old is set to marry Prince Harry next May and has quit her job on Suits to move London to live with the royal family.
Looking at her now, Markle is every bit a confident and charismatic woman, but it hasn’t always been that way.
Opening up in an interview with Darling magazine in 2015, the bride-to-be revealed her struggles with insecurity in her early 20s.
“I had a beat up Ford Explorer Sport that rattled like a steamboat engine in the morning, and had decided it didn’t want to open from the front doors anymore. It was burning out. It had started to give up. It was tired and running on empty going from audition to audition, just as I was,” Markle recalled.
She went on to reveal that she would drive to auditions and park as far away as possible so no one would see her climbing through the boot of her car just to get inside it.
“Frankly, it just felt soul sucking at the time,” she wrote, saying most nights she would eat grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner and drink cheap wine, hoping that one of her auditions would pull through.
“I was in my early 20s, still figuring so much out, and trying to find my value in an industry that judges you on everything that you’re not versus everything that you are. Not thin enough, not pretty enough, not ethnic enough, while also being too thin, too ethnic, too pretty the very next day.”
Markle goes on to say that Hollywood casting director April Webster, famous for working on Star Wars, Lost and Mission Impossible, made her realise her worth.
“I had never met her before, and at my very first audition for her, she stopped me mid-scene and said so simply, “You need to know that you’re enough.”
“I was breathless,” Markle recalled. “No one had ever seen it, or perhaps no one had ever called me out, but there in that small box of a room in Burbank, this woman I had never met saw me.”
On landing her role as Rachel Zane on Suits, Markle said: “Never would I have imagined that this show would not just change my career, but also change my life – that on my journey of trying to get what I wanted, of trying to see my dream come to fruition, I would learn who I am.”
