Meghan Markle is temporarily pausing her podcast Archetypes following Queen Elizabeth’s death late last week.
After debuting last month and releasing its first three episodes featuring personal conversations with stars like Serena Williams, Mariah Carey, and Mindy Kaling, the royal decided to go on hiatus with the show in order to pay respect to the late monarch. Spotify confirmed the news on Monday, changing the podcast’s “About” section to say that “New episodes of Archetypes will be paused during the official mourning period for Her Majesty The Queen Elizabeth II.” The streaming platform has yet to announce when the series will return.
After officially stepping down from their positions as senior royals at the beginning of 2020, Meghan and her husband Prince Harry announced that they had signed a reported $25 million deal for a multi-year partnership with Spotify via their production company Archewell Audio. As part of that contract, they also announced that they will be committed to producing programming that “uplifts and entertains audiences around the world; spotlights diverse perspectives and voices; and builds community through shared experience, narratives, and values.”
According to a press release announcing Archetypes, the podcast, “investigate[s] the labels that try to hold women back” and features the royal in conversation with various historians and experts as they seek to “uncover the origin of these stereotypes and have uncensored conversations with women who know all too well how these typecasts shape narratives.” In a teaser trailer from March, a supercut of some of the disparaging words and labels that have been applied to women in the media plays before the Duchess of Sussex explains, “This is how we talk about women, the words that raise our girls, and how the media reflects women back to us. But where do these stereotypes come from? And how do they keep showing up and defining our lives?” Two days after releasing its debut episode featuring Williams, Archetypes became the number one podcast in the United States, United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.
In her final episode before this hiatus, Meghan bonded with Kaling over feeling like an “ugly duckling” in high school. She explained, “Look, maybe not conventional beauty as it—now, maybe that would be seen as beautiful—but massive frizzy curly hair and a huge gap in my teeth. I was the smart one. Forever and ever and ever and ever. And, and then just sort of grew up.”
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