Meghan Markle said on her Archetypes podcast she was surrounded by "smart women" as a Deal or No Deal briefcase girl but "reduced" to "this specific archetype."
The Duchess of Sussex interviewed Paris Hilton for the latest episode—titled "Breaking Down the Bimbo"—of her Spotify show, which aired on Tuesday.
Meghan said: "I ended up quitting the show. Like I said, 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, 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.
"I didn't like feeling forced to be all looks and little substance. And that's how it felt for me at the time being reduced to this specific archetype."
Meghan's sentence then cuts into a clip of Clare Malone, a staff writer at The New Yorker, saying "the word bimbo" is used to "cut down a beautiful woman."
The duchess was in the early stages of her acting career when she joined the game show in 2006. She said it allowed her to get money and health insurance and join the union.
However, Meghan described the experience as "fascinating" but also shared some complicated feelings about it and said a woman who ran the show backstage would mispronounce her name and tell her: "Mark-el suck it in."
She said: "There were times when I was on set at Deal or No Deal and thinking back to my time working as an intern at the U.S. Embassy in Argentina, Buenos Aires, and being in the motorcade with the secretary of treasury at the time and being valued specifically for my brain.
"Here, I was being valued for something quite the opposite. I mean, you have to imagine just to paint the picture for you that before the tapings of the show, all the girls, we would line up.
"And there were different stations for having your lashes put on, or your extensions put in, or the padding in your bra.
"We were even given spray-tan vouchers each week because there was a very cookie-cutter idea, of precisely what we should look like. It was solely about beauty and not necessarily about brains."
The podcast anecdote represents the most comprehensive account Meghan has given of her time on Deal or No Deal after quickly moving off the subject when asked about it during a 2013 interview with Esquire.
Meghan told the magazine: "I would put that in the category of things I was doing while I was auditioning to try to make ends meet.
"I went from working in the U.S. Embassy in Argentina to ending up on Deal. It's run the gamut.
"Definitely working on Deal or No Deal was a learning experience, and it helped me to understand what I would rather be doing.
"So if that's a way for me to gloss over that subject, then I will happily shift gears into something else."
Update 10/18/22, 7:14 a.m. ET: This article has been updated with additional information.
Correction 10/18/22, 8:04 a.m. ET: This article was updated to indicate that the episode aired on Tuesday, not Wednesday.
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Jack Royston is Newsweek's Chief Royal Correspondent based in London, U.K. He reports on the British royal family—including King Charles ... Read more