I Wanna Marry Harry on Fox saw 12 American women think they were in with a chance of dating Prince Harry before he met wife Meghan Markle
Prince Harry’s dating life was in the spotlight before he met Meghan Markle.
Years before the Duke of Sussex settled down with his wife, and mother of their two children, Archie and Lilibet, one TV programme focussed on his royal love life. But not everything was as it seemed on Fox’s controversial reality show, I Wanna Marry Harry.
Single women from America were led to believe they were in with a chance of becoming Harry’s girlfriend, as 12 were flown over to England to take part in the series shot at an Elizabethan country home in Berkshire. It lasted a mere four episodes on TV, with the rest of the episodes uploaded to Fox’s website, and now the cast have had their say.
For all the latest on news, politics, sports, and showbiz from the USA, go to The Mirror US.
READ MORE: Prince Harry ‘has permanent look of bitterness as family refuse to acknowledge his efforts’
Despite contestants thinking they were meeting Harry, they were actually seeing lookalike Matthew Hicks. Show stars are now speaking out about the programme 10 years after it aired back in May 2014, accusing producers of “skewing reality” and “breadcrumbing” stories to trick women into thinking they’d be joining the Royal Family.
Show winner Kimberly Birch and fellow co-stars Meghan Jones and Chelsea Brookshire spoke about I Wanna Marry Harry on the podcast The Bachelor of Buckingham Palace. It turns out the women weren’t initially told about ” Prince Harry ” and thought they were filming the show “Dream Date”, saying producers planted clues royalty was involved.
“They started off really subtly, they had Kelly discover a newspaper article on a coffee table about Prince Harry,” Kimberly explained. “I don’t remember what it said but I remember her telling the rest of us, and one of the staff came and took it away from her.”
Meghan added: “I remember the production kind of laying these Easter Eggs for us to find, I tried to figure out what their agenda was.” Kimberly continued: “There was a night were we had security outside of our rooms and one of the security guards told a producer ”we have to get him back to the palace, there is a situation there with the royal family’, so whatever was heard, it suggested something that you weren’t supposed to hear.”
Meghan added: “Production came out and said ‘stop filming, stop filming, this is very serious’, so without camera’s on, they gathered all of us girls and producers in Kim and I’s room and they told us, ‘Your safety is at the utmost importance to us, we are dealing with someone who is a high target individual’, I thought that was their most impactful trick. If everyday you are being fed a s–t burger, and everyone around you is saying: ‘It’s ground beef, it’s ground beef, it’s ground beef’, you start wondering, ‘Is this s–t burger really ground beef?'”
Producers planned fake paparazzi chases and security threats to convince the women that Matthew was actually Prince Harry, even he admitted feeling uneasy as he had to lie about his identity too. Now a teacher and worlds away from showbusiness, with his natural hair colour restored, he also spoke out about feeling “quite isolated”.
“At the time I had no idea they were going to do that. I was a bit miffed and felt quite stressed, I didn’t appreciate the way they done it without telling me, but then again I signed up for this, I knew it might happen at some point,” he told the podcast. “I only had one option really and that was to just deal with it, so I just carried on the same way really and played it like it didn’t happen.”
At the end of the show, after Kimberly was crowned the winner, Matt had to reveal he wasn’t Prince Harry, but what they didn’t know what that if she still accepted him, non-royalty aside, they’d scoop $300,000 – which they did, splitting it between them both.
They stayed together for a few meetings relating to the show, but quickly separated and the show stopped airing due to terrible ratings. Kimberly was dragged on social media and in magazines, with outlets branding her ‘America’s most gullible women’.
“When I found out over the radio that it was called I Want to Marry Harry, I pulled over to the side of the road and called my mom and was like ‘Oh my god this is going to be terrible’,” she admitted. “There were really mean people on social media, so that part was really hard, no one wants to get hate mail.” Meghan said that all the contestants felt “betrayed and lied to” after the truth was exposed, along with the fake Prince Harry.
Follow Mirror Celebs on TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Threads.
