The creator of Suits, the legal drama which launched the acting career of the Duchess of Sussex, is opening up about input from the royal family on scripts.
Speaking to the Hollywood Reporter about the show’s resurgence on Netflix, where it has broken multiple viewership records for an acquired series, the creator, Aaron Korsh, said the royal family “weighed in” on scripts involving Meghan, who played the paralegal Rachel Zane for seven seasons, once she started dating Prince Harry in 2016. “Not many things, by the way, but a few things that we wanted to do and couldn’t do, and it was a little irritating,” he said.
Korsh recalled a particular incident in which the royal family objected to Meghan’s character saying the word poppycock on screen to refer to a topic that would be sensitive, a nod to Korsh’s in-laws. “The royal family did not want her saying the word,” said Korsh. “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.” The line was changed to “bullshit”.
Korsh added that he was not sure how the royal family obtained unfilmed scripts of Suits, and that Meghan herself was never responsible for delivering the edits. “It might have been the directing producer at the time, or her agent” who relayed the message, said Korsh. “Whoever it was, they didn’t like having to tell me any more than I liked having to hear it.”
Suits, a glossy legal procedural that ran from 2011 until 2019 on the USA network in the US, has become the breakout show of the summer, setting several Nielsen viewing records. It became Netflix’s most-watched acquired series in a single week, and accounted for a whopping 18bn minutes of viewing for the month of July. Meghan left the series after season seven in 2017, a year before she married Prince Harry.
Harry had previously revealed the palace’s intervention on the show in his memoir Spare, published this January, which detailed the effect of their relationship and palace scrutiny on Meghan’s career. “Meg packed up her house, gave up her role in Suits. After seven seasons. A difficult moment for her, because she loved that show, loved the character she was playing, loved her cast and crew – loved Canada,” wrote Harry. “On the other hand life there had become untenable.
“The show writers were frustrated, because they were often advised by the palace comms team to change lines of dialogue, what her character would do, how she would act,” he added.
