[News article] Why Meghan Markle was underrated as an actress

[TallerSally]

Rare praise from the i:
https://inews.co.uk/culture/television/a-suits-revival-wouldnt-work-without-meghan-2556238

The legal drama Suits is having a surprise moment in the spotlight 12 years after it first aired. The key to its success? Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex

@AcesBaseballbat

That's interesting. I always am baffled when Meghan's acting career is completely rubbished like she is some sort of taltentless nobody who barely scraped a living together. She was in 108 episodes of a popular legal drama and made over £2M from it.
Not too shabby....

And why her looks are compared to other famous female actors, god alone knows.

its obvious to me. some people hate her. they can't stand the fact that she has been successful in her career. so they make out it was not a popular show/that she is not beautiful/compare her to other women. or to michelle abama/amal clooney.
always trying to set her up to be seen as a failure. which she wasn't/isn't.

I agree, @AcesBaseballbat and @Roussette

I started this thread in reaction to the narrative on MN and elsewhere that:

Meghan achieved nothing of substance prior to meeting Harry
Meghan may have been an actress, but she has no talent
Any fame Meghan has is entirely due to her connection with Harry
...

Now that many people who'd never bothered to watch Suits are binge-watching it in the US and elsewhere (18+ billion viewing hours in the US in July alone, and now the 2nd most streamed show on Netflix, ever), the narrative among the snipers has shifted to:

Meghan isn't even the Western world's greatest actress
Meghan isn't even the most beautiful actress in Hollywood
If Meghan were any good as an actress she would have been a major Hollywood star
No-one is interested in Meghan anyway
not to mention "Suits' success has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with her", "it's only successful because there's nothing else to watch" and on and on...

Well, unless millions of people left their TVs on for days without watching (and just came back every couple of hours to press the "still watching" button), 18 billion viewing hours means a lot of people have watched Meghan and the ensemble cast and writers etc of Suits do their thing, and liked it enough to keep watching.

And as a PP said, all this may well be changing the above biases against Meghan. Clearly, some people have a big problem with that, hence the rush to create a new negative narrative.

I agree @Samcro too!

Totally agree TallerSally

I'd never heard of Meghan Markle until there was the Harry connection but is that such a bad thing... others say it like a criticism, I don't, I just had never watched Suits!

It obviously raised her profile to marry a member of the RF. That's just fact. She can't help that.

Interesting but incorrect take.

There have also been just as many threads about Meghan that have been deleted.

There are several threads about Kate currently: they criticise her marriage, say her children are over exposed, allege sexual tension between her and Roger Federer, accuse her of an eating disorder, call her family country bumpkins, talk about media hate towards her, criticise her clothing. I could go on but frankly pigeon chess is pointless and I can't believe I've been dragged into this again.

There have also been just as many threads about Meghan that have been deleted.

No there haven't. Nowhere near as many as stand over five years now.

Kate critical threads are few and far between. And no, I don't agree with them.

She is a very very poor actress

I'll be one of those then... and do over 100 episodes and make over £2million

Really poor that Meghan lol

I thought she was fine in Suits. I loved the series when it was first out and I would have remembered if I thought her acting was significantly worse than the other cast members. She didn’t stand out at all for bad or good for her acting skills. Unless you think the whole cast was bad.

She was fine as a guest actor on Castle.

She was quite bad in the Hallmark movies but I think that was early on and the scripts were not great.

I’m not a particular fan of the things Meghan has chosen to do since leaving royal duties but I think it’s important to separate that from her previous acting appearances.

I think Meghan is badly served by some of her more rabid cult-like fans who go overboard about her Hollywood career, star power and her supposed net worth on marrying Harry. It brings out the worst in the anti-Meghan crowd disputing their claims - like a massive perpetual seesaw.

Oh and I didn’t even realize it was her in Fringe for three episodes so again - she didn’t stand out as particularly bad there.

To be fair we are talking about American TV here which is pretty dire for the most part.

Would agree.

I watched Suits from the start and she was perfectly competent in the role of a supporting character.

I found the supporting characters of Donna and Louis stood out more than the character of Rachel - but that was more due to better character development with them. Gina Torres was superb - as she always is.

Meghan didn't stand out as a really good or really bad actor - she was good but not great, but that may have had far more to do with script/direction/character development. Rachel wasn't the most interesting or well developed character on that show, but Meghan did her job as an actor.

I don't remember seeing her in any other role tbh.

Threads about Meghan only get deleted if they descend into absolute bunfights, and most of the deleted Meghan threads were deleted due to racism (eg the thread where someone typed out the N word in full) or trolling (like the recent thread were someone used a racist term that's long been banned here, then the Meghan haters started mass-reporting every post they considered to have strayed an millimetre from the OP post as "derailing" so their own thread would be deleted).

I've never, ever seen a Meghan thread deleted within a few minutes of it being started, the way Kate threads are, even really outrageous vindictive bash threads. The Kate jewellery thread was deleted after a very short time, all the comments were either neutral or positive towards Kate, and there was no fighting in that thread. It was deleted because it expressed a slightly negative opinion about Kate and that's not allowed.

I've seen two threads about Kate's weight and both were deleted within less than ten minutes of being started. MNHQ are very clear that discussion of Kate's weight and body is banned.

And you're being highly selective in terms of how you present other threads. For example you've worded your post in such a way as to insinuate that someone started a negative thread about the Middletons and that other Mumsnetters were describing them as "country bumpkins." When in fact it was a Harry-bashing thread, with a thread title strongly implying that Harry had made a quote referring to the Middletons as "country bumpkins", when in fact that quote was made by a tabloid hack trying to flog a book, who had deliberately and very disingenuously put her own words in quotation marks to imply it was a direct quote from Harry. Most of the "Middleton country bumpkin thread" was posters saying how awful and terrible Harry was, and other posters pointing out it was a fake quote and he didn't actually say that, then the last few pages got completely derailed into trashing the Sussex's work and charity endeavours, which actually WAS derailing since it had nothing to do with the country bumpkin article at all, but of course those comments didn't get mass-reported.

I think she is underrated as an actress because she played a role which was far too similar to herself so not much of a challenge really.

@AcesBaseballbat so true about threads about Meghan.
I haven't seen one deleted in years. anything can be said about H&M, even some horrid ablest stuff about Harry, left to stand.

as it was mentioned earlier, Aaron Korsh discusses the palace intervening about the script. I can understand why they did, that is why suggestions she could continue acting once married to Harry while he was still a working royal, were a bit naive.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-features/suits-creator-meghan-markle-line-palace-removed-1235575191/

Indeed @Iwantcakeeveryday, the Aaron Korsh interview is already trending, showing that Harry was telling the truth about palace interference in Spare, though not many folks are acknowledging that (surprise!).

One quote from Aaron Korsh stands out: "I will say, and I think Harry put this in the book, because I heard people talking about it — [the royal family] weighed in on some stuff. 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."

I don't think the fact that the palace interfered with Suits scripts, and therefore may have had some impact on Rachel Zane during her last series, should come as a surprise to anyone.

All this (palace interference in Suits) got me thinking about the other posts about negative MN threads about Kate being swiftly taken down, while negative threads about M&H are left to run.

Could something similar be going on here?

I watched the first few series of Suits when they came out (before she and Harry got together). I definitely found her memorable and I loved the clothes. I found all the romantic storylines in it annoying though. Mike and Rachel, Donna and Harvey. I just didn't find they had any chemistry and preferred other storylines. I think MM was probably one of the best actors in it for me though. Also got a bit bored with Mike's terrible secret 😲 and found him a bit of a twerp.

he was a bit of a twerp lol. I think that is why I preferred the Donna Harvey, will that won't they story line.

That is interesting.

So the Palace did look out for her interests on a few occasions by intervening and ensuring she didn't end up ridiculed later and with doctored crude memes doing the rounds. I think it is another thing that probably worked for H & M at the time, but then Harry turned it to a negative through spite.

In fact, lots of agents do exactly that on behalf of their stars.

Glad it's not just me 😂. I'm sure the actor is lovely IRL BTW, but just didn't like that character.

PS: I like your username! I need to get netflix to rematch SoA! Another of my guilty TV loves 💘

the palace were looking out for themselves @themessygarden and what they think their image should be.

I always thought Samcro was a person, kept waiting for them to appear lol