Rumours that Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, was in talks to star in a TV show came as a surprise to many on Friday night, but hundreds of thousands of fans on TikTok had already been watching her star in an AI-generated soap opera of her own life for months.
Across a network of six TikTok accounts identified by The Observer, with names such as “Royal Palace Stories” and “Princess Stories”, AI-generated videos depicting familial tensions and drama between the Sussexes and the royal family are viewed by tens of thousands of fans each day. In this fictional royal world, Meghan and Queen Camilla have formed an alliance to “stand up” to the rest of the family. Prince Harry and Prince William remain frosty.
The imagined drama has helped fill an information vacuum for a global audience desperate for news about their move, their reasons and their relationships with the rest of the Firm.
Neither the couple or the royal family have made any statements since the news broke on Wednesday. Even the King was said to have been blindsided by their decision, only finding out last Sunday that his son would be returning home with his family. He had reunited with his grandchildren for the first time in four years last month at Highgrove in Gloucestershire, in a meeting the Palace described as a “private family occasion”.
It has been confirmed that Prince Harry and Meghan are moving back to the UK this month and that their children, Archie, seven, and Lilibet, five, have been enrolled in a British school for September. They will not live in a royal residence and no change is expected to their non-royal status. The Prince and Princess of Wales were also reportedly informed of their plans.
But many details remain a mystery. It’s not known when they will arrive, where they will settle or how long they plan to stay. Questions remain over their security and their finances. Last year, when Prince Harry lost his bid to overturn the court’s decision for his security to be downgraded, he said that he “can’t see a world” in which he’d bring his family to the UK. But something must have shifted.
Meghan may now be under pressure to land an acting gig to bring in money. Was she in talks to join Guy Ritchie’s Netflix television show The Gentlemen, which follows an aristocratic duke who served in the army – like her husband – and inherits a drug empire? Tina Brown, former editor of the New Yorker, reported on Friday that she was, and yesterday that “the backlash in the UK was so intense, it became untenable to go forward”. Meghan will make a return to acting anyway, playing herself in the forthcoming Amazon MGM film Close Personal Friends.
When they left the UK and stepped back from their royal duties, the couple stopped receiving any money from the royal family. Prince Harry reportedly had an inheritance of around £20m from his mother, Diana, which funded their move. He told Oprah Winfrey in his 2021 interview that the money his mother left him was what allowed him and Meghan to move to the US. “It’s like she saw it coming and she’s been with us through this whole process,” he said. Since then, the couple have signed a series of lucrative deals.
In September 2020, they signed a five-year deal with Netflix – reportedly worth between $60m and $100m – to produce films, documentaries and children’s programming Prince Harry’s 2023 memoir Spare sold more than 3.2m copies globally in its first week and he reportedly received a £16m advance.
In 2025, when their Netflix contract ended, the couple signed a new watered-down “first look”’ deal with Netflix which included financial support for Meghan’s lifestyle brand As Ever, but was less lucrative. The streaming service ended its partnership with the brand. On Friday, As Ever emailed its customers with the subject line: “a new chapter to celebrate”, and advertised an $89 sparkling wine.
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Meghan and Prince Harry’s company is producing two forthcoming Netflix films and a drama series about polo. But no other financial deals have been reported.
The question of state-funded private security also hangs over the couple’s return. The Sussexes lost their right to automatic police security when Harry left his role as a working member of the royal family in 2020. Last week, the Times reported that the couple would not receive taxpayer- funded armed police protection when they return. But longer-term arrangements are expected to include some form of publicly funded protection, requiring the independent Royal and VIP Executive Committee (Ravec) to determine what level of security should be granted.
A review by Ravec into whether the couple’s security needs should be met by the state was meant to be carried out in March but a backlog meant that no decision was taken. A risk assessment was finally carried out last month and Harry is said to be expecting a decision imminently. His security bill will cost much more if he is to be based in the country permanently – former police officers have estimated between £2m to £5m a year.
One problem, according to some sources, is a shortage of trained armed police protection officers. “I understand there aren’t enough of them and some are getting seconded to other duties,” one said.
On Thursday, the prime minister insisted the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s security arrangements were a “private matter”. Home Office officials stressed that Ravec was operationally independent from the department that it sits within. A Home Office spokesperson said: “It is our long-standing policy not to provide detailed information on those arrangements, as doing so could compromise their integrity and affect individuals’ security.”
Officially, as far as Buckingham Palace is concerned, Harry and Meghan remain private individuals with no role in the Firm. But there is a recognition that the media attention they garner risks stealing the limelight from the work of the King and Queen and other family members including the Prince and Princess of Wales.
It’s not so different in the imagined world of royal AI slop. In one video shared on “futuremonarchy1”, Meghan throws a cup of tea on Princess Catherine, who is dressed in a tiara and diamonds. “Where are your manners? Why would you do that?” a shocked – but still somewhat robotic – AI Catherine responds.
AI Meghan is unrepentant: “Stop trying to control me. You may be a princess in this family, but you don’t get to dictate how I live.”
Additional reporting by Richard Palmer and Catherine Neilan
The pictures in this article are stills taken from AI-generated videos