Meghan Markle Claims She Was Treated as a ‘Bimbo’ on ‘Deal or No Deal’: I Felt ‘Forced to Be All Looks and Little Substance’

Meghan Markle is speaking out about her time on the hit game show Deal or No Deal — saying she felt show’s the producers reduced her to a “specific archetype” focused on beauty and not brains.

During the Tuesday episode of her podcast Archetypes, Markle spoke with socialite Paris Hilton in an effort to break down the meaning behind the phrase “bimbo,” a term Markle felt reduced to during her time on the game show.

Markle began the conversation by discussing her time on the show and how, at first, she was pleased with the job.

“My experience on the show, which included holding said briefcase on stage, alongside 25 other women doing the same. It was for me, fascinating,” Markle said. “I had studied acting in college at Northwestern University, and like a lot of the other women standing on stage with me, acting was what I was pursuing. So while Deal or No Deal wasn’t about acting, I was still really grateful as an auditioning actress to have a job that could pay my bills.”

“And yet I had also studied international relations in college,” she continued. “And 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 US 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.”

Markle lamented the preparation ahead of the episodes, saying, “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 actress turned Duchess recalled a producer on the show repeatedly instructing her to hold in her stomach during the tapings. And after a year, she quit.

“Like I said, I was thankful for the job, but not for how it made me feel, which was not smart,” said Markle whose IMDB page lists her as “Briefcase Girl #24” for numerous episodes.

“I was surrounded by smart women on that stage with me, but that wasn’t the focus of why we were there,” she added. “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.”

Listen above via Archetypes.