If you’re a fan of Meghan Markle, you likely already know that before she was an actor on Suits and later a rogue duchess, she had a brief stint as a “briefcase girl” on the gameshow Deal Or No Deal, where her job was to be hot and occasionally open a briefcase on stage. Shockingly, Meghan didn’t find this gig to be particularly fulfilling—though she was grateful for the health insurance.
On her Archetypes podcast, the duchess opened her “Breaking Down ‘The Bimbo’” episode by sharing a few details from this era of her life, after chancing upon Deal Or No Deal while flipping channels recently. Meghan called the experience “fascinating.” Like a lot of the other women who shared the Deal Or No Deal stage with her, Meghan was pursuing a career in acting, which she had studied in college. Being a briefcase girl wasn’t really acting, but it did give her a paycheck and healthcare and a union card. “And yet,” she said, “I had also studied international relations in college, and there were times I was on set at Deal or No Deal and thinking back to my time working as an intern at the U.S. Embassy in Argentina in Buenos Aires and being in the motorcade with the security of treasury at the time and being valued specifically for my brain. Here, I was being valued for something quite the opposite.”
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In order to maintain the very “cookie cutter” beauty standards the show required, Meghan says she and the other women were even given weekly spray tan vouchers. One moment she says is stuck in her brain is a showrunner who mispronounced her last name like “Markel” shouting at her backstage, “Markle, suck it in! Markle, suck it in!”
Luckily, Meghan Markle didn’t have to stay a briefcase girl for long, and quit after about a year. Soon, she was cast as Rachel Zane in Suits in 2011, where she stayed for seven years before marrying Prince Harry. And we all know how that turned out.
