Not holding back. Meghan Markle said that she wouldn’t play the “game” of royal life.

During an interview with New York magazine’s The Cut published on Monday, August 29, Meghan, 41, said the strict rules about releasing family photos was one example of what made life as a royal so challenging. “There’s literally a structure by which if you want to release photos of your child, as a member of the family, you first have to give them to the Royal Rota,” she told the outlet.

The Royal Rota is the United Kingdom press pool that covers the royal family.

“Why would I give the very people that are calling my children the N-word a photo of my child before I can share it with the people that love my child?” the Suits alum asked. “You tell me how that makes sense and then I’ll play that game.”

Prior to marrying into the royal family, Duchess Meghan regularly updated her fans through her now-defunct blog, The Tig. She also spoke about her struggles to live a more private life after she started dating her now-husband, Prince Harry, in 2016. “It was a big adjustment — a huge adjustment to go from that kind of autonomy to a different life,” the mother of two told The Cut.

Meghan spoke out against the royal family’s lifestyle one week after she revealed that she was forced to continue a Royal Africa tour after her son Archie’s room caught on fire.

Markle Says She Wouldn't Play ‘Game’ of Royal Life: ‘It Didn’t Have to Be This Way’
AP/Shutterstock

During the debut episode of her podcast, “Archetypes,” on August 23, she revealed that a fire broke out in the nursery where Archie, 3, was staying while she and Harry, 37, were visiting Africa in September 2019.

“When we went on our tour to South Africa, we landed with Archie,” Meghan began. “Archie was what, 4 and a half months old. And the moment we landed, we had to drop him off at this housing unit that they had had us staying in.”

She continued, “He was going to get ready to go down for his nap. We immediately went to an official engagement in this township called Nyanga, and there was this moment where I’m standing on a tree stump and I’m giving this speech to women and girls, and we finish the engagement, we get in the car and they say, ‘There’s been a fire at the residence.’ What? ‘There’s been a fire in the baby’s room.’ What?”

The couple rushed back to the residence and found their nanny “in floods of tears.”

“She was supposed to put Archie down for his nap, and she just said, ‘You know what? Let me just go get a snack downstairs.’ And she was from Zimbabwe, and we loved that she would always tie him on her, her back with a mud cloth, and her instinct was like, ‘Let me just bring him with me before I put him down,’” Meghan recalled. “In that amount of time that she went downstairs, the heater in the nursery caught on fire. There was no smoke detector. Someone happened to just smell smoke down the hallway went in, fire extinguished.”

Despite being “in tears” over the incident, the California native said that they were forced to return to another scheduled engagement on the tour.

“I was like, ‘Can you just tell people what happened?’ And so much, I think, optically. The focus ends up being on how it looks instead of how it feels,” she continued. “And part of the humanizing and the breaking through of these labels and these archetypes and these boxes that we’re put into is having some understanding on the human moments behind the scenes that people might not have any awareness of and to give each other a break. Because we did — we had to leave our baby.”

Just months after the tour, Harry and Meghan announced their plans to step down from their senior royal duties and become “financially independent” in January 2020.

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