Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's return to the United Kingdom at the end of August has prompted a blunt verdict from a PR expert: their chances of becoming lasting names in Hollywood have taken a serious hit. Eric Schiffer said the move was the “kiss of death to stardom in America for both of them,” a judgment that lands just as the couple still has unfinished work with Netflix.
That is why the search for Prince Harry And Meghan is surging now. They are back in Britain, but the move has not been described as permanent, and they have not sold their Montecito home. At the same time, they still have Netflix TV projects in the pipeline, including adaptations of Carley Fortune's Meet Me at the Lake and Major Adam Jowett's Afghanistan War memoir No Way Out, which keeps open the question of whether they are retreating from America or simply regrouping.
Schiffer told Newsweek that the couple's U.S. run was weakened by a string of setbacks that made them easier to dismiss in Hollywood. He pointed to the ridicule that met Harry's memoir Spare in 2023, the collapse of their Spotify deal that June after just one podcast, and the harsh response to Meghan's podcast series Archetypes. Spotify executive Bill Simmons later called the couple “f****** grifters” on his own show, a line that captured how far their brand had fallen with parts of the entertainment world.
Meghan's own screen ambitions have also been narrowed by the reception to With Love, Meghan, which drew searing reviews and failed to produce the kind of numbers that would force Hollywood to take notice. The second season and festive special did not make Netflix's top 1,000 shows over the six-month period in which they were released. That matters because the couple built much of their public reinvention around entertainment, signing multi-year Netflix and Spotify deals in their first nine months in the United States and later launching Archewell Foundation, now rebranded as Archewell Philanthropies.
Yet the move back to Britain does not settle the bigger question. Some reports suggested it might be temporary, and the couple has not closed the door on U.S. work by selling their California base. Page Six reported on September 9 that Meghan had only had a casual conversation with the casting director for The Gentleman, which fits Schiffer's view that she may still try acting again but would likely be limited to B-list opportunities rather than a full Hollywood comeback. For now, their next step looks less like a fresh launch than a retreat to figure out what is left of the brand they tried to build in America.
