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Meghan’s Netflix Curtsy Clip Is Circulating Again as the Sussexes Return to Britain — Here’s What the Moment Actually Shows
The 2022 scene in which Meghan reenacted her first curtsy to Queen Elizabeth II became one of the most divisive moments in Harry & Meghan. Its revival after the couple’s 2026 return to Britain shows how little the public argument around the Sussexes has faded — but some of the strongest claims now attached to the clip go beyond what the footage and polling can establish.
September 15, 2026
A three-year-old Netflix clip has become part of Britain’s royal conversation again after Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, returned to the United Kingdom with their children. The footage is familiar: Meghan sits beside Harry on a cream-colored sofa, recounts the first time she met Queen Elizabeth II, spreads her arms and performs an exaggerated deep curtsy before laughing about the experience.
The scene originally appeared in the second episode of the six-part Netflix documentary Harry & Meghan, released in December 2022. It immediately divided viewers. Critics saw the reenactment as mockery of royal tradition and, by extension, disrespect toward the late Queen. Supporters argued that Meghan was making fun of her own lack of preparation as an American entering an unfamiliar institution rather than ridiculing Elizabeth personally.
That disagreement has never really disappeared. Now the Sussexes are back in Britain, the clip is being reposted as evidence in a much larger argument about whether the couple can rebuild a life in the country they left in 2020 — and whether the British public is willing to separate their present-day return from the media battles, interviews, memoirs and family allegations that followed their departure.
The basic facts of the Netflix scene are not in dispute. Meghan said she learned only shortly before the meeting that Queen Elizabeth would be present at Royal Lodge. Harry asked whether she knew how to curtsy. Meghan said she initially thought he was joking. She then compared the experience, from an American perspective, with “Medieval Times, dinner and tournament,” before performing the dramatic bow and saying, “Pleasure to meet you, Your Majesty.”
Harry himself framed the protocol as difficult to explain to someone who had not grown up around the monarchy. In the same sequence, he said that telling an American she needed to curtsy to his grandmother could seem “weird.” That context is important because the couple presented the anecdote as a culture-clash story: Meghan encountering a royal custom she had not understood, and Harry acknowledging how unusual that custom could seem from outside the institution.
The reaction, however, was immediate. Some viewers described the demonstration as disrespectful. Royal author Gyles Brandreth called it “mocking” and “embarrassing,” arguing that the exaggerated motion did not resemble a normal curtsy. More recently, royal biographer Simon Vigar has described the moment as “beyond the pale” and “the last straw” for viewers who already believed Meghan lacked respect for royal conventions.
Those are opinions, not findings of fact. But they help explain why the scene has endured. It reduced a complicated dispute over culture, hierarchy and belonging to a few seconds of highly visual television. People did not need to read a memoir or follow years of palace briefings to understand why the moment could be interpreted negatively. The image itself became shorthand for an argument about Meghan’s attitude toward the institution she had married into.
The timing also intensified the reaction. Harry & Meghan premiered on December 8, 2022, exactly three months after Queen Elizabeth II died on September 8. The footage had been recorded earlier, when the Queen was still alive, but British audiences encountered the scene during a period when public mourning and reflection on Elizabeth’s reign were still fresh. That made a joke about royal etiquette more emotionally charged than it might have been at another time.
It is therefore fair to say the curtsy scene alienated some viewers and became one of the documentary’s most controversial sequences. It is not possible, however, to establish that it was “the moment most of the UK” turned against Meghan. Britain’s opinion of the Duchess had already deteriorated substantially before the Netflix series appeared, following the couple’s 2020 departure from royal duties, their 2021 Oprah Winfrey interview and continuing disputes with the Palace and the press.
YouGov’s long-running royal favourability tracker illustrates that broader decline. Meghan’s positive rating in Great Britain had fallen from 55% in October 2019 to 23% by May 2022, months before the Netflix curtsy episode aired. In December 2022, the month the series was released, 25% viewed her favourably and 64% unfavourably. By July 2026, immediately before the Sussexes’ return to Britain, YouGov recorded 22% favourable and 65% unfavourable.
Harry’s numbers are also negative, though less severe. In July 2026, 33% of Britons told YouGov they viewed him favourably while 58% viewed him unfavourably. That represented some improvement from the previous year, but it still left both Sussexes well below the most popular senior members of the Royal Family.
Those representative polling figures are more useful than viral reader polls when measuring the public mood. A Daily Express online poll circulated before the couple’s return, for example, reported that 94% of participating readers did not want Harry making regular trips to Britain. But it was a self-selected poll of Express readers, not a representative survey of the British population. It demonstrates strong hostility among that publication’s participating audience, not that 94% of all Britons oppose Harry’s presence.
What is clear is that the Sussexes have returned to a country where negative views of them remain widespread. On August 26, Harry, Meghan, Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet arrived back in Britain after six years based primarily in California. They are living outside London rather than in a royal residence and remain non-working members of the Royal Family under the settlement reached when they stepped away from official duties in 2020.
The move surprised even senior members of the family. Reuters reported that King Charles was informed only shortly before the relocation became public. The couple’s children were enrolled in British schools, one of the clearest signs that the stay was more significant than a short visit.
That arrangement has already changed. On September 14, the couple’s spokesperson confirmed that Archie and Lilibet were moving schools after just two days because the original school run created transportation and security concerns. The family’s security team concluded that the distance and heavy traffic made the daily journey difficult to protect. The spokesperson emphasized that the move was not a criticism of the school or its staff.
Security remains one of the most important unresolved issues surrounding the Sussexes’ return. Harry has spent years challenging the removal of automatic police protection after he ceased being a working royal. The government committee responsible for royal and VIP protection is now reviewing security arrangements for both Harry and Meghan in light of their renewed residence in Britain.
Their official royal position, by contrast, has not changed. King Charles recently authorized formal guidance to senior government and military figures reiterating that Harry and Meghan are non-working royals whose charitable and commercial activities are undertaken privately. The guidance also reaffirmed that they do not use the HRH styles in practice. The couple said they were surprised by the way the letter was released, though the substance restated the 2020 settlement rather than creating a new royal status.
That institutional boundary matters when evaluating claims that their move represents a royal comeback. It does not. They have returned to Britain as high-profile members of the King’s family, but they have not resumed public duties on behalf of the sovereign. Their projects, appearances and businesses remain separate from the work of the Royal Household.
The years between their departure and their return were filled with ventures that repeatedly brought royal family tensions into public view. In the 2021 interview with Oprah Winfrey, Meghan described concerns and conversations about how dark Archie’s skin might be before his birth. The interview triggered a major race controversy around the monarchy. Harry later insisted that neither he nor Meghan had directly called the family racist, saying he distinguished racism from what he described as unconscious bias.
Harry’s 2023 memoir Spare added another layer by recounting private disputes with his relatives, including his allegation that Prince William knocked him to the floor during a 2019 argument about Meghan. Kensington Palace did not publicly litigate Harry’s account point by point. The memoir nevertheless deepened the public impression of a family conflict being fought through books, interviews and television rather than inside palace walls.
The Netflix series itself was commercially significant. Netflix says Harry & Meghan recorded 23.4 million views and became its most-watched documentary in its first four days. That success is part of the reason moments such as the curtsy scene became so culturally persistent: the footage was not an obscure clip from a tabloid interview but part of one of the most widely watched royal documentaries of the streaming era.
It is also inaccurate to say that the couple’s entire American media business simply collapsed. Their Spotify agreement did end in 2023 after producing one series, Meghan’s Archetypes. Their original Netflix arrangement later evolved rather than disappearing altogether: in August 2025, Netflix announced a multi-year first-look deal with Archewell Productions for film and television projects. The terms are different from the broad production agreement the couple signed after leaving royal duties, but a continuing commercial relationship remains.
Meghan has also remained active in lifestyle and entertainment projects. Reuters reported in August that she was in discussions about a possible acting role connected to Guy Ritchie’s Netflix series The Gentlemen, though no casting had been confirmed and a third season had not yet been formally announced at the time of that reporting. It would therefore be speculation to state as fact that the family returned to Britain because Hollywood had rejected them or because their finances forced the move.
Reporting from Reuters and ITV has instead pointed to several overlapping reasons for the return: the children’s education, Harry’s desire to give Archie and Lilibet stronger ties to Britain, improved contact with King Charles, the practical pull of Harry’s charitable work and the couple’s continuing professional connections in the UK. Those explanations do not erase commercial considerations, but they are more defensible than reducing the decision to a single motive.
That brings the argument back to the resurfaced curtsy clip. For critics, the footage remains powerful because it seems to validate a larger narrative: that Meghan entered an institution whose traditions she never respected, later turned those traditions into entertainment, and expected British audiences to accept the result as harmless self-deprecation.
For supporters, the interpretation is unfairly literal. They see a former actress telling a humorous story about her own ignorance and anxiety, not attacking Queen Elizabeth. Vanity Fair, among others, argued at the time that the joke was directed at Meghan’s American unfamiliarity with monarchy and the theatricality she associated with royal ritual, rather than at the Queen as a person.
The footage itself cannot conclusively settle that dispute because intent is not visible in a frozen frame. Harry’s facial expression has also been treated as evidence by body-language commentators who claim he looked embarrassed or uncomfortable. He does look away during part of the sequence, but reading a definitive emotion or marital judgment from a few seconds of edited television goes beyond what the footage alone can prove.
Harry’s own later account complicates the idea that Meghan’s real curtsy was intended as disrespect. In Spare, he described her actual greeting to the Queen as successful and recalled that family members reassured her after the meeting. That is consistent with the possibility that the exaggerated Netflix reenactment was comedy about how enormous the moment felt to Meghan, not a literal reproduction of the gesture she performed in front of Elizabeth.
None of that requires critics to find the joke funny. A person can reasonably believe that an exaggerated reenactment of a royal curtsy was tasteless, particularly so soon after the Queen’s death. The fact-checking distinction is narrower: disliking the scene is different from proving that Meghan intended to ridicule Elizabeth, and widespread criticism is different from proving that one clip single-handedly turned an entire country against her.
The same distinction applies to the broader claim that Britain has issued a permanent moral verdict on the Sussexes. Current polling shows deep unpopularity, especially for Meghan. It does not show that every Briton holds the same view, that opinions can never change or that all hostility stems from the curtsy scene. Public attitudes toward the couple have been shaped by years of events, including their departure from royal duties, disputes over security and funding, media lawsuits, the Oprah interview, Netflix, Spare and ongoing conflict with parts of the British press.
There is also a contradiction at the heart of the couple’s public life that continues to attract criticism. Harry and Meghan left royal duties while seeking greater control over their privacy and relationship with the media, yet they also built high-profile commercial projects around their personal story. That tension is real. It helps explain why critics view the Netflix curtsy scene not as an isolated joke but as part of a pattern in which intimate royal experiences became material for global entertainment.
At the same time, privacy does not necessarily mean invisibility. Public figures can seek limits on intrusion into their children, homes or private communications while still giving interviews or producing documentaries. Whether Harry and Meghan have drawn that boundary consistently is a legitimate subject for criticism, but the fact that they have a media business does not eliminate every privacy claim they make.
Their return to Britain guarantees that those arguments will become more intense, not less. They are physically closer to the Royal Family, their children are now being educated in Britain, Harry’s security status is under review, and the couple’s movements are once again a daily subject for British newspapers. The old footage therefore has a new function: it gives opponents a compact visual reminder of why they distrusted Meghan in the first place.
But the record is more complicated than the viral caption. The scene did anger many viewers. It did become one of the defining controversies of Harry & Meghan. It aired only three months after Queen Elizabeth’s death, which heightened its emotional impact. And Meghan remains deeply unpopular in current British polling.
What the evidence does not establish is that the clip was objectively a sneer at the Queen, that it was the single moment “most of the UK” rejected Meghan, or that the Sussexes returned solely because their American ventures failed. Those conclusions are interpretations layered on top of real events.
That distinction matters because the Sussex story has always generated more heat than precision. Supporters and critics routinely take genuine facts — a Netflix scene, a memoir allegation, a security ruling, a polling number — and build much broader narratives around them. The strongest reporting separates what happened from what people believe it means.
What happened here is clear enough. Meghan reenacted a curtsy in an exaggerated way while describing the shock of meeting Queen Elizabeth. Many viewers found it disrespectful. Others saw self-mocking humor. Harry sat beside her and participated in the discussion. The documentary became a major global hit. Three months earlier, the Queen had died. Four years later, after a long period of negative polling and public family conflict, Harry and Meghan returned to live in Britain for an extended period with their children.
That return has made the old clip newly relevant because the couple are once again asking, implicitly if not formally, to build a life inside the same national culture whose royal traditions became material for their documentary. They do not need to become working royals to face that history. The British public will continue to judge them through it.
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For critics, the curtsy scene remains a symbol of disrespect that cannot be erased by moving back to Britain. For supporters, it remains an overinterpreted joke that has been weaponized for years. The most supportable conclusion lies between those absolutes: the scene was genuinely provocative, it damaged Meghan’s image with some viewers, and its revival shows how durable the resentment remains — but the evidence does not justify turning a divisive television moment into a definitive verdict on the motives or feelings of an entire country.
