The Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle, has claimed in a recent interview that she was “objectified” when she was a briefcase girl on the show Deal or No Deal. She also spoke about the stereotype of being a “dumb blonde” in the same interview with Paris Hilton. Markle had originally appeared on the game show in 2006 after graduating from Northwestern University with a degree in acting.
She says that although she was an aspiring actress at the time, she also had great interest in international relations and had interned at the U.S. Embassy in various countries.
Meghan Markle on her time during ‘Deal or No Deal’
View this post on Instagram
“I was thankful for the job, but not for how it made me feel. Which was… not smart. And by the way – I was surrounded by smart women on that stage with me,” Markle said of the game show. “But that wasn’t the focus of why we were there. And I would end up leaving with this pit in my stomach, knowing that I was so much more than what was being objectified on the stage.”
RELATED: Royal Expert Claims Meghan Markle Has ‘Made A Lot of Enemies’ After Playing The ‘Victim’
When it came to the dumb blonde stereotype, Hilton herself had a lot to say, as she was often made out to be this exact stereotype by the media back in the early 2000s. Hilton says she’s the opposite of a dumb blonde in real life. “Like during that time, it was like, encouraged, almost,” Hilton says. “Like it was, like, cute to be, like, dumb and bubbly and that kind of like, blonde thing. Like, I look at it now and I’m like, I think it’s so much cooler to be smart and intelligent, but back then, it was almost like they wanted… girls to be like that in some way.”
“Yeah it was glorified,” Markle responds. “And it’s not specific to here and it’s not even specific to that decade. This is something that happens globally. This idea of dumbing women down and women dumbing themselves down.”
It was on the show The Simple Life that Hilton really created this other persona of the dumb blonde, adding that she would use it as a “mask” to hide behind. “So it could be like, they’re not talking about me,” she says. “They’re talking about this character that I created. So it would kind of help, I don’t know, the pain of the media just constantly just being mean and just very vicious and cruel to me for so long.”
RELATED: Former ‘RHONY’ Star Bethenny Frankel Compares Meghan Markle To A Housewife