Harry and Meghan's Paths in the US: Their Quest for Independence and Entertainment Industry Trials

Harry and Meghan did not explain their decision to leave the UK solely out of a desire for economic independence. Meghan said in the interview she gave to Oprah Winfrey in 2021 that made a worldwide impact that it was "liberating" for her to be able to make her own decisions. Harry, on the other hand, argued that the USA offered his family a degree of privacy and freedom that they could not have in England, and stated that this was the life his mother, Princess Diana, would have wanted for herself. The couple settled in Montecito, California, where celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey and Gwyneth Paltrow live. Then the doors of Hollywood opened. Harry and Meghan's arrival to the United States attracted great attention in the entertainment industry. They signed a deal with Spotify reportedly worth up to $25 million. The 12-episode Archetypes podcast, in which Meghan hosted names such as Serena Williams and Mariah Carey, was the most important product of this partnership. However, Spotify and the couple parted ways in 2023. It was reported that the value of the five-year agreement signed with Netflix in 2020 was between 60 and 100 million dollars. Many productions emerged from this partnership, but the agreement was later replaced by a new arrangement with a lower budget. The high employee turnover in the couple's production company also attracted attention. It has been suggested that some former employees privately referred to themselves as the "Sussex Survivors Club". Harry's biggest commercial success in the USA was his memoir Spare, in which he described his experiences with the royal family. The book, for which he reportedly received an advance of approximately $20 million, sold more than 6 million copies worldwide and broke the record as the fastest-selling non-fiction book at the time of its publication. Harry was an executive at Silicon Valley-based company BetterUp and co-created The Me You Can't See with Oprah Winfrey, a program focusing on mental health. He also worked on Netflix projects such as Heart of Invictus, about veterans, and Polo, about one of his passions, the sport of polo. However, none of these productions captured the attention generated by the couple's six-part Harry & Meghan documentary or Harry's statements about the royal family. This picture led to comments that Harry had difficulty getting out of his royal identity in the USA.