Tennis great Serena Williams appeared as the first-ever guest.
Meghan Markle is hoping fans of her new podcast finally get the real version of the Duchess of Sussex. And she aims to be, in her words, "unfiltered."
Markle has set those expectations in a teaser of her new Spotify podcast, Archetypes With Meghan, which debuted Tuesday and featured her longtime friend, Serena Williams, as the first-ever guest. In the teaser, Markle, 41, says her fans, in a way, will finally really get to know who she is.
"People should expect the real me in this, and probably the me that they've never gotten to know," she said. "Certainly not in the past few years, where everything is through the lens of the media. As opposed to, 'Hey, it's me.' I'm just excited to be myself, and talk and be unfiltered and ... yeah, it's fun."
Markle's new podcast will also "investigate, dissect, and subvert the labels that try to hold women back." Ahead of its episode with the tennis great, Archetypes With Meghan dropped a trailer previewing some of the labels they get into, and she promises to "cut through the noise" and "get to the roots of these words."
In the premiere episode, Markle revealed that, while on a royal tour with Prince Harry in 2019, a fire broke out in their son, Archie's, nursery room and she was forced to continue the tour.
"When we went on our tour to South Africa, we landed with Archie," Markle recalled in her conversation with Williams. "Archie was, what, four and a half months old. And the moment we landed, we had to drop him off at this housing unit that they had us staying in."
While Archie was left with his nanny to have a nap, Markle and Prince Harry immediately embarked on an official engagement in Nyanga, where she would deliver a speech to a group of women and girls.
"We finish the engagement, we get in the car and they say, 'There's been a fire at the residence,'" she said. ''What? 'There's been a fire in the baby's room.' What?!"
The new parents raced back to find their "amazing nanny," Lauren, "in floods of tears."
"She was supposed to put Archie down for his nap, and she just said, 'You know what? Let me just go get a snack downstairs.' And she was from Zimbabwe, and we loved that she would always tie him on her, her back with a mud cloth, and her instinct was like, 'Let me just bring him with me before I put him down.' In that amount of time that she went downstairs, the heater in the nursery caught on fire. There was no smoke detector. Someone happened to just smell smoke down the hallway, went in, fire extinguished," Markle said. "He was supposed to be sleeping in there."
While the family was "in tears" and "shaken," Markle says that she and Prince Harry were forced to continue on with their scheduled engagements.
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