Lifetime’s Prince Harry, Meghan Markle Movie Announcement Causes Whitewashing Concerns

Lifetime announced during its Television Critics Association panel on Sunday that a TV movie based on Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s relationship is currently in the works.

“Harry & Meghan: The Royal Love Story” will be a romantic film following Prince Harry and his new fiancée, Markle, from their blind date set up by friends to their secret relationship to the internet-breaking news of their engagement. The movie will also take a look at Markle’s life as both an American actress and a divorced woman, and how those two things have affected her overall relationship with Prince Harry and the media attention surrounding it.

With casting underway and the film set to premiere in 2018, some people are worried that the network will make the mistake of whitewashing the character that’s based off of Markle, who’s biracial.

“They better not be whitewashing Meghan’s character in the Lifetime movie of Harry and Meghan,” Twitter user Royal Realness tweeted in response to the movie news. “I suggest Candice Patton, Zawe Ashton or Zendaya.”

GingerNutmeg agreed that actress Patton, who stars as Iris West on The CW’s “The Flash,” would be a good choice, and then threw Nathalie Emmanuel, who plays Missandei on “Game of Thrones,” out there as another option.

Though after making “William & Kate: The Movie,” based on Prince William and Kate Middleton’s story, Lifetime has some experience with royal British TV movies, the last one didn’t have a biracial lead they had to make sure they cast correctly. This time, they do, and fans want them to make sure they do it right.

This goes not only for Lifetime, but for all networks that aim to make a movie based on the newly-engaged couple. When International Business Times revealed in December that Hallmark Channel was looking into the possibility of producing a Prince Harry-Meghan Markle movie, the same concerns were shared on social media.

“Let’s hope they [Hallmark] realise that there are great mixed race Black actresses out there who ‘look’ like Meghan and not try to ‘whitewash’ her to make her more palatable to British psyche,” Twitter user havendalegirl wrote. “MM has a Black mother... they need to accept this.”

With Lifetime’s “Harry & Meghan: The Royal Love Story” set to premiere in 2018, and likely before the real-life May nuptials, fans will find out soon enough who the network chose to play Markle.