Being a royal is a cross between “being in The Truman Show and living in a zoo”, Prince Harry reveals in this Armchair Expert podcast. The 90-minute episode sees an unfiltered Harry sit down with actor and recovered addict Dax Shepard to swap “vulnerabilities”. “This motherf*’s got a tremendous body,” Shepard tells us, before getting into Harry’s “lived experience”. They also agree to ride dune buggies and fly an Apache helicopter together.
The first time Harry and his wife, Meghan, “met up for her to come up and stay with me” was in Kensington Whole Foods, “pretending we didn’t know each other” while wearing baseball caps. Living an hour outside LA has its perks: he can put his son, Archie, “on the back of my bicycle”, and new pals Orlando Bloom and Katy Perry live down the road. They text to warn each other about paparazzi.
Mostly, he wants to break his family’s cycle of “genetic pain” – therapy has helped. He says his father, the Prince of Wales, “treated me the way he was treated” by the Queen and Prince Philip. “I started to piece it together and go, ‘OK, so this is where he went to school, this is what happened, I know this about his life.’”
Kudos to Harry for saying the “things millions of young men need to hear”, says Victoria Richards in The Independent. Privileged or not, no one should have to mask their problems with “drink, drugs and wild partying”. Actually, it’s sad, says Sarah Vine in the Daily Mail, just weeks after Prince Phillip’s funeral. Not even the Queen can escape the “wrecking ball of Prince Harry’s self-pity”, not that this seemed to cause him “the slightest iota of concern”.
Listen to the podcast here.