Meghan Markle Tells Oprah About Prince Harry Teaching Her to Curtsy Right Before Meeting the Queen

Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, opened her interview with Oprah Winfrey sharing about how she went into her marriage to Prince Harry “naively,” telling how she had refrained from researching her future husband online and how he had to teach her to curtsy right before she met Queen Elizabeth for the first time.

Markle sat down alone with Winfrey at the beginning; her husband would join later. The conversation started with her wedding, and Markle said that she had “tried to make it fun and light and remind ourselves that this was our day.”

“But I think we were both really aware, even in advance of that, this– this wasn’t our day. This was the day that was planned for the world.”

“Everybody who gets married knows that you are really marrying the family too,” said Winfrey. “But you weren’t just marrying a family. You were marrying a 1,200-year-old institution. You were marrying the monarchy. What did you think it was going to be like?”

“I will say, I went into it naively,” said Markle, describing how she had not followed news of the British royal family growing up in America, had not researched Harry or any of the family, and just in general how the perception did not match with reality.

Markle also shared an amusing anecdote about the first time she met the Queen, which she described as “the first moment that the penny dropped, that this was going to be like nothing she’d ever experienced:

And I remember Harry and I are in the car, and he says, “Okay, well, my– my grandmother’s there, so you’re going to meet her.” I go, “Oh, great. I love grand– I loved my grandmother. I used to take care of my grandmother. This is great.” He goes, “Right, do you know how to curtsy?” “What?” Said, “Do you know how to curtsy?” Now, I thought genuinely that that was what happens outside. I thought that was part of the fanfare or — I didn’t think that’s what happens inside. And I said, “But it’s your grandmother.” He goes, “It’s the queen.”

Winfrey asked Markle if she Googled how to curtsy, and she laughed and said no, because they were in the car, but they did practice outside for a few minutes first.

Her first meeting with the Queen, and first curtsy, went just fine, but the royal family, she would learn, were not the same as other celebrities she had encountered in L.A.

Watch the video above, via CBS.