Meghan Markle was still playing Rachel Zane on the show when she got together with Prince Harry.
The creator of Suits is opening up about the royal family's interference with Meghan Markle's role on the USA legal drama. Aaron Korsh, the creator of the series, which ran for nine seasons on USA, opens up to The Hollywood Reporter about Suits' resurgence in popularity on Netflix, citing Markle's role as Rachel Zane as one of the contributing factors.
When Markle first got the part, she was relatively unknown. The California-born actress later rose to fame due to her romance and eventual marriage to Prince Harry. At the time, she was finishing up her role on Suits alongside her on-screen husband, Patrick J. Adams (Mike Ross).
Korsh tells THR that the royal family "weighed in" on some parts of the show's final season, noting it was "not many things," but one dialogue change that he did find "a little irritating."
"I remember one was a particular line of dialogue and, look, I’ll just say what the line was. My wife’s family, when they have a topic to discuss that might be sensitive, they use the word, 'poppycock.' Let’s say you wanted to do something that you knew your husband didn’t want to do, but you wanted to at least discuss it, and in just discussing it, you wouldn’t hold him to anything he said, you’d be like, 'It’s poppycock,'" Korsh recalled. "So, in the episode, Mike and Rachel were going to have a thing, and as a nod to my in-laws, we were going to have her say, 'My family would say poppycock.'"
This line didn't sit well with the royal family, who Korsh claims didn't want the future Duchess of Sussex to say the word.
"They didn’t want to put the word 'poppycock' in her mouth. I presume because they didn’t want people cutting things together of her saying 'cock,'" Korsh speculated. "So, we had to change it to 'bulls**t' instead of 'poppycock,' and I did not like it because I’d told my in-laws that [poppycock] was going to be in the show. There was maybe one or two more things, but I can’t remember."
Korsh added that he didn't know how the family got advanced copies of the script and that Markle herself wasn't the one to call him to ask for the dialogue change.
"I can’t remember. It might have been the directing producer at the time, or her agent," he shared. "Whoever it was, they didn’t like having to tell me any more than I liked having to hear it."
He added that he understood the splicing concern, saying, "I wouldn’t want somebody doing that to her either. And the thing is, I didn’t think anybody really would, but also I don’t know. People are crazy."
Markle appeared on the show alongside Adams, Gabriel Macht, Sarah Rafferty, Rick Hoffman, Dulé Hill, Wendell Pierce, and Katherine Heigl from 2011 to 2018.
Earlier this summer, Nielsen reported that the series set a streaming record on Netflix during the week of June 26 to July 2.
During that week, Suits, which began streaming on Netflix on June 17, had 3.14 billion minutes of watch time, setting the record for an acquired series. The record was previously held by Manifest, which had 2.49 billion watch minutes from June 14 to June 20, 2021, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Executive producer Gene Klein previously shut down the idea of Markle returning to the series for a potential reboot.
"I would assume that's just not possible," he told TVLine earlier this month.
Meghan and Prince Harry currently live in California with their children, Archie, 4, and Lilibet, 2. They stepped down as senior members of the royal family in 2021, and have been estranged from Harry's family in the years since. They have discussed the tension on their Netflix docuseries, Harry & Meghan, and in Harry's bestselling memoir, Spare. Harry, in particular, has highlighted the tension between himself and his father, King Charles III, his older brother, Prince William, and his sister-in-law, Kate Middleton. In Spare, he writes that William and Kate were big Suits fans, but were also concerned with the fact that Markle was an American actress when the couple first got together.
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