At the beginning of the first episode of their new Apple TV+ documentary series The Me You Can’t See, Oprah Winfrey asks Prince Harry what made him first think he needed therapy, early in his relationship with Meghan Markle.
“The past,” Harry responds. “To heal myself from the past.”
Sitting down for a televised interview with Winfrey for the second time in less than three months, Harry returns to many of the topics he and Meghan discussed in their blockbuster interview last March— Harry’s lingering grief from the death of his mother Princess Diana, Meghan’s suicidal thoughts and struggles with negative press coverage, and their shared frustration with how ill-equipped the royal family was to address any of it. But in the three episodes provided in advance to the press (of the five that will all debut May 21), Harry goes deeper on all of it, including the series of headlines that have followed the first bombshell interview suggesting he shouldn’t share any of this. “That was one of the biggest reasons to leave,” he says. “Feeling trapped and feeling controlled through fear, both by the media and by the system itself, which never encouraged the talking about this kind of trauma. Now I will never be bullied into silence.”
Continuing Harry’s years of work promoting mental health efforts, The Me You Can’t See weaves his story in with that of many others, including Winfrey, Lady Gaga, NBA star DeMar DeRozan, and aspiring Olympic boxer Virginia Fuchs. Each interviewee is working through issues of their own, with Oprah and Harry discussing their childhood traumas, Gaga talking about her experience with chronic pain, and Fuchs revealing intimate details of her experience with OCD. Therapists and psychologists weigh in with medical insight on each story, and the overarching message of the series could probably be summed up in three words: Go to therapy.
Harry, who grew up in a family famous for repressing its emotions, emerges as an effective poster boy for the power of talking it out, even sitting down on camera for a virtual therapy session with Dr. Sanja Oakley, who helps him revisit and move past troubling childhood memories. “For me, therapy has equipped me to be able to take on anything,” Harry says in the third episode. “That’s why I’m here now, that’s why my wife is here now. That feeling of being trapped within the family, there was no option to leave. Eventually when I made that decision for my family, I was still told, you can’t do this. I thought, how bad does it have to get before I am allowed to do this?”
In his earlier interview alongside Meghan, Harry referenced his fear that history would repeat itself, and that Meghan’s intrusive press coverage would have the same devastating effect as Diana’s. In the new documentary Harry goes even further, recounting to Winfrey the racist tabloid headlines about Meghan and saying that, if he has any regrets about his royal exit, it’s not speaking up about the racism sooner. Referring to Diana’s 1997 death in a Paris car crash alongside her boyfriend, Dodi al-Fayed, Harry said, “History was repeating itself. My mother was chased to her death while she was in a relationship with someone that wasn’t white, and now look what’s happened.” As the documentary cuts to footage of Meghan at a previous engagement, Harry continues, “You want to talk about history repeating itself—they’re not going to stop until she dies.”
Meghan and Archie appear only briefly in the three episodes, in a home video shot by Harry that features the family with their dogs on a California beach. But Harry credits Meghan early and often with his decision to start therapy, saying that in an early fight between them, “I reverted back to 12-year-old Harry.” (The young royal was 12 when Diana died.) Through publicly available but extraordinarily well-researched footage of the royal family, the documentary illustrates how Harry was impacted by the press photographers that followed Diana everywhere. “Unfortunately when I think about my mum, the first thing that comes to mind is always the same one over and over again—strapped in the car, seatbelt across, with my brother in the car as well, being chased by 3, 4 5 mopeds, with the paparazzi on them,” he says. “She was always unable to drive because of the tears. There was no protection.”
Revisiting the day of his mother’s funeral, Harry says of himself and his brother Prince William, “both of us were in shock. It was like I was outside of my body and just walking along doing what was expected of me.” The archival footage of his teenage years shows Harry seeming to physically recoil from the cameras, as he describes in the interview that “the clicking of cameras and flashes of camera makes my blood boil, makes me angry, brings me back to what I experienced with my mum.”
Despite some reported fears within the palace that Harry might use the documentary shed further light on the rifts among the royals, most of the focus remains on his own experience—though he reiterates that he couldn’t find the help he needed within his family. When Meghan began receiving negative press coverage, he says, “I thought my family would help, but every single ask, request, warning, just got met with total silence or total neglect.” Describing the night at the Royal Albert Hall that he and Meghan discussed with Winfrey in their previous interview, when his wife had just revealed to him her suicidal thoughts, Harry explained his thoughts at the time: “I’m also really angry at myself that we’re stuck in this situation. I was ashamed that it got this bad. I was ashamed to go to my family. To be honest with you, like a lot of people my age can relate to, I know that I’m not going to get from my family what I need.”
With Harry’s story woven in among all the others in the first three episodes, his struggles are presented as part of a broader context— as a source close to Harry told Vanity Fair recently, “He feels he needs to share his own story in order to encourage others to open up. He hasn’t gone into this wanting to attack his family, but to help others.” Though the royal family reportedly cannot understand why Harry would open up in this way, placing his experience alongside so many others makes a strong case— whether or not the remaining younger royals follow his lead, Harry is proving with The Me You Can’t See that there are some feelings that can’t, and shouldn’t, be tamped down forever.
Given the BBC’s recent acknowledgement of wrongdoing surrounding Princess Diana’s 1995 Panorama interview, The Me You Can’t See could be part of a broader reckoning around media coverage of the royal family, something Harry and Meghan have both lobbied for with their series of media lawsuits. But if the documentary series only encourages more people to go to therapy, or be truthful about their feelings— it’s hard not to imagine Harry would see that as a victory, too.
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