What’s Meghan Markle doing now?
It’s both one of the top “People also ask” results when you Google the Duchess of Sussex—and a fair question for anyone who’s losing all hope of ever being able to order their own jar of that strawberry jam from American Riviera Orchard that caused such a tizz on social media this spring.
In terms of official public appearances, it’s been nearly two months since she and Harry went on their tour-but-not-a-royal-tour to Nigeria. Bar a blurry TikTok video taken by a runner in a Beverly Hills park which may or may not have been her—the uncharacteristic tracksuit the pixelated figure seems to be wearing raises doubts—the only other sighting of Meghan in June seems to be from the Montecito Farmers’ Market.
Those snaps, released by paparazzi agency Backgrid, show Meghan perusing the market stalls in a Breton-striped top, before, per the Daily Mail, getting into her car and driving off.
Her destination—a rented mansion not far from her own home in Montecito, per the tabloid—is a major clue about what has been keeping Meghan busy behind the scenes. (And no, it’s not setting up a separate household for herself, however persistent the unsubstantiated “couple spending time apart” tittle-tattle seems to be. In that alternate universe, Meghan and/or Harry have been living in a hotel since, like, 2020.)
What’s happening with Meghan’s cooking show?
Instead, it seems like Meghan’s been spending her time out of the public eye filming her nebulously concepted lifestyle/cooking/“gardening and friendship” show for Netflix—and, per the Daily Beast, has just wrapped filming.
“It all went well,” an industry source told the online publication, source of previous scoops about the royals. “It is now in the can,” this insider added for a bit of convincing Hollywood jargon.
The show, per filming permits found by the Daily Mail, seems to have been shot at several locations, including a florist at a town on the California coast, and a rented house, complete with its own avocado and lemon orchard, in a gated community in Montecito.
What happened to American Riviera Orchard?
And speaking of orchards: After soft-launching in the spring with a teaser influencer campaign—i.e. Meghan sending pots of jam to some of her famous pals—it’s been a conspicuously slow burn on the American Riviera Orchard front.
Meghan’s lifestyle brand, which has registered the trademarks to sell everything from cutlery to yoga mats, hasn’t been active on its social media account since a vibe-y set of Instagram Stories, which seemed to show Meghan arranging flowers and cooking in a showpiece kitchen, went live back in March.
Since then, there’s been a slow-drip product reveal: Those jars of strawberry jam a few months ago, and more recently, raspberry jam and dog biscuits, which debuted on Harry’s polo pal Nacho Figueras’s Instagram in June.
The timing of this, just a few hours before Kate Middleton’s appearance at Trooping the Colour, had some questioning the purity of Meghan’s motives—particularly confusing if recent “reports” of the Duchess of Sussex seeking a reconciliation with her sister-in-law currently in treatment for cancer are true.
The latest rumours
In fact, per the to-be-taken-with-a-shovel-of-salt In Touch Weekly, Meghan has been “secretly” reaching out to Kate, trying to express the “regret” she feels about how “things went down” when she and Harry left the Royal Family.
“She’s been going out of her way to show concern for Kate at this difficult time,” this “source” told the tabloid. Let the record show: Harry and Meghan did release a public statement when Kate’s cancer diagnosis—which The Times claims they found out about on TV like the rest of us—was made public, wishing her “health and healing.”
In news that will shock no one, another tabloid is concurrently claiming the exact opposite is the case. “Harry is more willing to move on,” another anonymous contributor told the Express. “It’s not a case of Meghan being difficult, she genuinely feels hurt and would like some kind of sit down to hash things through – but that’s not something the other side is willing to consider at this time,” the tabloid’s source claims, painting Meghan as the stumbling block to any kind of reconciliation with the Windsors, rather than the one extending an olive branch via Kate.
The Mirror, for its part, at least has a source who’s willing to be on the record: Tom Quinn, author of works such as Scandals of the Royal Palaces: An Intimate Memoir of Royals Behaving Badly.
“There is a growing rift between Harry and Meghan caused by Meghan’s increasing concern that her life is not going in the direction she had planned,” Quinn claims. “She loves media attention and hates the fact that surveys suggest she and Harry are no longer of much interest to the American public.”
In fact, he says that “Meghan feels very much under siege” at the moment, worried about the future of her and Harry’s Netflix deal and what he claims she’s perceived as “mockery” of American Riviera Orchard.
“She has reached the point now where she thinks that anything and everything she does will be unfairly criticized,” Quinn told the Mirror in another interview a few months ago. “Like her husband, she feels that people are unfairly picking on her – she cannot understand why people don’t admire her work.”
If stories about her cooking show wrapping are true—far more likely to be than any of the unsubstantiated tabloid wittering above, by the way—we will, at least, have some of that work to assess sooner rather than later.
And maybe even a pot of jam to sample at the same time.