Oprah Winfrey has looked back at one of the most memorable moments from her 2021 interview with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. Speaking in a recent video for Vanity Fair on July 21, 2026, the television host looked back at the interaction with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. She asked Meghan whether she had been “silent or silenced” during her time as a working member of the royal family. The interview took place shortly after both Prince Harry and Meghan stepped away from royal duties and moved to Montecito, California.
They didn’t know, obviously, anything that I was going to ask them, but I had said to them ahead of time, ‘I’m going to try to cover everything,’ she told Vanity Fair for a career recap video.
During the original interview, Meghan explained that she had always encouraged women to speak up but felt she had remained silent during her final years as a part of the British royal family. Oprah immediately asked whether that silence had been her own choice or whether she had not been allowed to speak. “I wanted to be clear, because was she silenced? Were people telling her not to talk?” she explained. “I said it for clarification, because I didn’t want later to hear, ‘Well, no, it wasn’t that. It really was that I was silenced. They wouldn’t let me talk.’ So it was all for clarification,” Oprah revealed.
The 2021 interview created headlines around the world and included several other major revelations. Another important topic was Prince Harry and Meghan’s claim that the royal family discussed how dark the skin of their son, Prince Archie, could be before he was born. “They didn’t want him to be a prince…which would be different from protocol, and that he wasn’t going to receive security,” she shared in the interview. “We have, in tandem, the conversation of, ‘He won’t be given security. He’s not going to be given a title.’ And also concerns and conversations about how dark his skin might be when he’s born.”
