Before she married Prince Harry and became Duchess of Sussex in the British Royal Family, Meghan Markle was best known for playing Rachel Zane on Suits. The TV show originally aired on USA Network from 2011 to 2019, with Markle departing at the end of Season 7. Four years after its conclusion, Suits is back in the public consciousness thanks to a lot of Netflix subscribers streaming the first eight seasons over the last several months, so naturally series creator Aaron Korsh has been reflecting on this chapter of his professional life lately. That now includes him revealing the time that the Royal Family demanded one of Markle’s lines be cut from the show.
In an interview with THR, Korsh talked about how when Markle and Prince Harry were dating, this led to the British Royal Family weighing in on “some stuff” regarding Suits, and while there weren’t many instances of them chiming in with suggestions/requests, he nonetheless found this to be “a little irritating.” When the interviewer asked what kind of “things” Korsh was referring to, he answered:
I remember one was a particular line of dialogue and, look, I’ll just say what the line was. My wife’s family, when they have a topic to discuss that might be sensitive, they use the word, ‘poppycock.’ Let’s say you wanted to do something that you knew your husband didn’t want to do, but you wanted to at least discuss it, and in just discussing it, you wouldn’t hold him to anything he said, you’d be like, ‘It’s poppycock.’
Aaron Korsh and the Suits writing team decided to incorporate this game into Season 7’s 13th episode, titled “Inevitable,” which aired on April 11, 2018, five months after Markle’s engagement to Prince Harry was announced. However, ahead of shooting the episode, the British Royal Family made it clear that they didn’t want “poppycock” coming out of Meghan Markle’s mouth, requiring the writing team to pick a replacement word. As Korsh explained:
So, in the episode, Mike and Rachel [Markle’s character] were going to have a thing, and as a nod to my in-laws, we were going to have her say, ‘My family would say poppycock.’ And the royal family did not want her saying the word. They didn’t want to put the word ‘poppycock’ in her mouth. I presume because they didn’t want people cutting things together of her saying ‘cock.’ So, we had to change it to ‘bullshit’ instead of ‘poppycock,’ and I did not like it because I’d told my in-laws that [poppycock] was going to be in the show. There was maybe one or two more things, but I can’t remember.
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While Korsh doesn’t remember how the Royal Family acquired the Suits scripts, he did clarify that it wasn’t Meghan Markle who informed him that “poppycock” was a no-go, but rather likely either “the directing producer at the time, or her agent.” Whomever it was, the show creator acknowledged that they weren’t happy about the situation either, but once this individual explained the worries about the “splicing potential,” Korsh was sympathetic since he didn’t want footage of Markle saying “poppycock” being edited in such an humiliating way.
Ultimately not getting to use “poppycock” in that episode was a minor ripple in the Suits creative process, and Aaron Korsh also acknowledged while irritation was his “initial reaction” when he was told he couldn’t do something on the show, he would usually get over that pretty quickly. This recollection follows the creator sharing his take on why Suits has been performing so well on Netflix, as well as why he’s ok if a revival of the show never happens, although he is still interested in doing a prequel spinoff about Rachel Zane’s father, Robert Zane, who was played by Wendell Pierce.
Those of you wanting to stream the entirety of Suits will need a Peacock subscription to check out that final season. Otherwise, look at the other best shows on Netflix available to watch now, or see what’s coming up with the Netflix TV schedule.