Meghan Markle told Meghan Markle, “you can create the life better than any princess.”

When Meghan Markle started dating Prince Harry, she described being a princess as “completely different” from what her friends imagined royal life would be like.

On Thursday, the Duke of Sussex spoke as a guest on Dax Shepard’s “Armchair Expert” podcast. During their chat, Prince Harry said that his wife was conscious that her life would change as a result of her marriage to the royal family, but that she expected things to be fair.

Prince Harry told Shepard, “[But] I think she said before she expected it to be fair [marrying into the royal family].”

“I think that old way of thinking – the prince and the princess – and little girls reading these wonderful fairytales and thinking ‘all I want to be is a princess,’ and I’m thinking erm…,” he said in an interview with American actor Dax Shepard for his Armchair Expert podcast.

“My wife had the most amazing explanation to that which is something like, you don’t need to be a princess to create an amazing life. And that’s coming from her own lived experience.

“When we got together she was like ‘wow, this is completely different to what my friends at the beginning said it would be like’.”

The revelation came when Harry was asked about what it was like to live as a true royal – and how it differed from the portrayals of princes and princesses in film.

He also said that he used to watch Disney movies when he was younger, which host Dax Shepherd said would have been “bizarre” for him when he was royalty.

Shepherd asked Prince Harry what it was like when the “ultimate prize” wasn’t “all that euphoric” in shows where the “ultimate prize was to become royalty.”

Meghan and Harry began dating in 2016 and became engaged the next year, while staying at Kensington Palace’s Nottingham Cottage.

In May 2018, they married in a ceremony at Windsor Castle and went on to do engagements before leaving the royal family in 2020 and relocating to the United States.

After being part of the royal family, the duke said his wife developed this perspective, “You don’t need to be a princess. You can create the life that will be better than any princess.”

The Duke of Sussex also tended to criticize Prince Charles’s upbringing, speaking of the royal family’s “genetic pain and suffering” and vowing to “break the cycle” for his children.

He compared life in the royal family to a combination of living in The Truman Show and being in a zoo during the interview, which he did to advertise his upcoming Apple TV+ series about mental health, The One You Can’t See, with Oprah Winfrey.

“There is no blame,” Harry said when asked about his childhood. “There is no blame. I don’t think we should be pointing the finger or blaming anybody, but certainly when it comes to parenting, if I’ve experienced some form of pain or suffering because of the pain or suffering that perhaps my father or my parents had suffered, I’m going to make sure I break that cycle so that I don’t pass it on, basically.”

“It’s a lot of genetic pain that gets passed on anyway so we as parents should be doing the most we can to try and say: ‘You know what, that happened to me, I’m going to make sure that doesn’t happen to you.'”

He said he realized he didn’t want the royal “job” when he was in his twenties after seeing what it did to his mother, Princess Diana. “I’ve seen behind the curtain, I’ve seen the business model, I know how this operation runs and how it works,” he said, adding, “I know how this operation runs and how it works. I don’t want to be part of this. It’s a mix of being in The Truman Show and being in the zoo.”

The Truman Show is a satirical film starring Jim Carrey from 1998, in which the main character discovers he is the hidden star of an international hit reality TV show.

Prince Harry’s remarks have the potential to rekindle friction between the pair and Prince William and Kate Middleton, who have strongly established themselves in royal life.

Unlike the Sussexes, the Cambridges have remained inside the Firm rather than “creating a life that will be better than any princess.”

Harry made headlines earlier this year when he told Oprah Winfrey that his brother and father was “trapped” in the Royal Family.