‘The show must go on,’ is the theatre saying that Meghan seems to stick to during royal occasions.
But Prince Harry, who grew up following the customs and traditions which Meghan chastised, appeared embarrassed by his wife’s lack of decorum.
In the Netflix docuseries Harry & Meghan, the Duchess re-enacted her first time meeting the late Queen.
A giggling Meghan appeared to mock her own efforts at following royal protocol as she recounted the ‘surreal’ moment – performing a deeply exaggerated curtsy in front of an awkward-looking Harry.
Recounting the ‘intense’ moment, she performed a deep curtsy as husband Harry watched on, stone-faced, before he glanced off-camera. The pair then chuckled afterwards.
Meghan met the Queen for the first time during a lunch at the Royal Lodge in Windsor, shortly after she and the Duke revealed they were dating in 2016.
But she said the occasion felt like a banquet at Medieval Times, a family restaurant in the US featuring sword-fighting and jousting.
The Queen was the first senior member of the Royal Family that Meghan met after she and Prince Harry announced their relationship.
Meghan compared the ‘surreal’ encounter with the Queen to a night out at US restaurant Medieval Times. She is pictured with the Queen in 2018
Harry said: ‘She had no idea what it all consisted of.’ He looks on as she re-enacts her curtsy
‘I didn’t know I was going to meet her until moments before,’ Meghan said
Meghan said: ‘I remember driving up in the car and Harry said, “You know how to curtsy, right?” and I just thought it was a joke.’
‘She had no idea what it all consisted of,’ Harry told the docuseries, as he sat with his arm around his wife. ‘So it was a bit of a shock to the system for her.’
Grinning, Meghan added: ‘I mean. it’s surreal. There wasn’t like some big moment of, “Now you’re gonna meet my grandmother”.
‘I didn’t know I was going to meet her until moments before.
‘We were in the car and we were going to the Royal Lodge for lunch, and Harry was like, “Oh, my grandmother is here, she’s gonna be there after church”.’
Harry told the documentary: ‘How do you explain that to people? How do you explain that you bow to your grandmother? And that you would need to curtsy, especially to an American. That’s weird.’
Meghan added: ‘Now I’m starting to realise this is a big deal. I mean, Americans will understand this.’
Meghan and the Queen in June 2018
The scene caused a stir on Twitter at the time, with viewers branding it ‘disrespectful and offensive’ to the monarchy
The promotional art for the Netflix documentary Harry & Meghan
‘We have Medieval Times dinner and tournament. It was like that. Like, I curtsied as though I was like… “Pleasure to meet you your Majesty”.
‘It was so intense. And then when she left, Eugenie and Jack and Fergie say “you did great!”. Thanks. I didn’t know what I was doing.’
The scene caused a stir on Twitter at the time, with viewers branding it ‘disrespectful and offensive’ to the monarchy.
Meanwhile, others claimed Prince Harry looked ‘VERY uncomfortable’ as his wife poked fun at her attempt at a curtsy.
The Duchess also said in her interview with Oprah that Prince Harry helped her practice her curtsy moments before the Queen entered the room.
Body language expert Louise Mahler told the Morning Show: ‘Side by side I see a man deeply besotted by her, madly in love – and I see a woman who plays that up.’
Meghan’s acting career spanned from the early 2000s until her marriage to Harry in 2018, with her most prominent role being Rachel Zane in Suits
Mahler said that Meghan’s behaviour in the clip is ‘theatrical’, adding that she may be ‘dramatising their love affair for the public’.
Speaking of Harry’s body language, she said Meghan’s actions may have humiliated him.
Meghan as paralegal Rachel Zane in the TV series Suits, who she played from 2011 to 2017
Meghan at the season five premiere of Suits in January 2016
The docuseries began with an attack on Buckingham Palace’s decision not to co-operate with the series.
During the second episode Meghan spoke about the ‘formality’ of the royals behind closed doors, saying she was ‘surprised’ by this.
‘I was a hugger [and], always being a hugger, I didn’t realise that that is really jarring for a lot of Brits,’ she added.
‘I guess I started to understand very quickly that the formality on the outside carried through on the inside.’
Elsewhere in the documentary, Meghan confessed she had to Google the British national anthem in the early days of her relationship with Prince Harry.
She admitted that she repeatedly practiced the patriotic rendition of ‘God Save The Queen’, before joining the Royal Family.
She also said that ‘the wave is not a thing’, claiming that she wasn’t trained to move her hand any special way – but jokingly added she didn’t want to flail her hands ‘like an American’.
The duchess’s clueless reaction to curtsying could also have been an act
But Meghan’s clueless reaction to curtsying could also have been an act.
In a resurfaced clip from season two of Suits, the former actress performs a quick curtsy in her role as paralegal Rachel Zane.
The footage – which was filmed in 2010 – shows Louis Litt (played by Rick Hoffman) thanking Rachel for some research she’s done into a case he is working on.
He then jokingly prompts her to bow for him – and, in response, Rachel performs a quick curtsy before being thrown out of his office.
Sharing the clip online, Instagram user Emilie said this was an example of the duchess doing a ‘perfect curtsy’.
Meghan’s journey to becoming a full-time member of the Royal Family was fraught with a lot of well-publicised difficulties.
In her months of dating Prince Harry and in the lead up to their wedding, there had been critical stories in the Press showing she was happy to trample on royal protocol.
So when Meghan went on her first royal engagement with the Queen in June 2018, the couple were nervous about how it would be covered.
On Meghan’s first joint engagement with the Queen there was a row after a video showed the newly created duchess entering a car before the monarch
Meghan can be seen entering the car first and moving along to sit behind the front passenger
But things seemed to go well, as when Meghan was photographed making the Queen laugh, most of the coverage featured the pair of them giggling – with the Daily Mail’s front page reading: ‘How did Meghan make one so amused?’
Although conversations with the Queen are usually private, Harry revealed in his 2023 memoir Spare that the pair bonded over their love of dogs and motherhood.
But a minor row did also break out following the visit, after a video emerged which showed the pair sharing a moment of confusion about who should get in a car first.
Meghan first offered to let the Queen get in first – before suggesting they switch round, asking: ‘What’s your preference?’
It is believed Meghan offered to let her new in-law go before her because the monarch preferred to sit behind the driver’s seat.
After a few seconds of going back and forth, a flustered Meghan eventually stepped in at the Queen’s instruction before the then 92-year-old monarch followed her in.
Royal expert Tina Brown later wrote in her 2022 book The Palace Papers that the Queen had a ‘twinkle in her eye’ when she allowed Meghan to take precedence.
Etiquette expert William Hanson told MailOnline at the time: ‘The Queen always sits behind the driver.
Meghan later revealed to Harry that she talked to the Queen about her desire for children during their first joint engagement
Although the apparent confusion over the car only played a small part in the event, Harry still seemed to be angry about it when he wrote his memoir Spare half a decade later
‘This is just a case of habit, not protocol [protocol actually says the most important person sits diagonally behind the driver] but the Queen has always preferred being directly behind whoever is driving her.
‘Meghan was probably not aware of this and the royal household may have forgotten to brief The Duchess of Sussex in this nuance.’
Despite the evidence showing the coverage had been positive and largely focusing on the fact she managed to make the Queen laugh, Harry had a surprising reaction, writing ‘the papers pronounced the trip an unmitigated disaster’.
‘They portrayed Meg as pushy, uppity, ignorant of royal protocol, because she’d made the unthinkable mistake of getting into a car before Granny’, he wrote.
It was the only time the Queen and Meghan carried out a joint engagement.
It is no surprise that Meghan, entering the Firm aged 36, struggled to adapt to some of the royal protocols.
But the question remains whether she played on her thespian past to create drama and outrage in their very public relationship.
