When Tyler Perry and Meghan first had a conversation the Duchess has admitted she was really candid with the Hollywood filmmaker, even though the pair had never actually met in person.

At the time of Prince Harry and Meghan’s royal exit, they were facing a couple of major issues that had serious implications for their safety. Their police security had been stripped, as they were no longer publicly funded working royals, at the same time borders were rapidly closing due to the coronavirus pandemic. Unsure of what their next steps should be, one unexpectedly generous offer was made that ended up providing them with a safe haven where they could find their feet.

The offer came from filmmaker and director Tyler Perry, who gave Meghan and Harry a place to stay and even provided them with a security detail, but what came as a surprise to many people was that Perry had never actually met them. Whilst he has since become firm friends with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and was even asked to be their daughter Princess Lilibet’s godfather, Meghan herself has admitted that she confided in the Hollywood mogul before they had ever met in person.

Meghan made the admission about her confessions to Tyler Perry during an interview with The Cut magazine that was released around the time she was launching her podcast Archetypes. She candidly admitted that “Sometimes, you can tell your life story to a stranger on a plane as opposed to some of the people that are closest to you.” The Duchess also explained that Perry had first got in touch with her around the time of her wedding to Prince Harry in 2018, and let her know that if she ever needed anything he would be happy to help. But it wasn’t until their royal exit that Meghan and Harry took him up on his kind offer.

Perry appeared in Harry and Meghan’s docu-series for Netflix

Perry told her that he would keep her in his prayers and, Meghan said “that he could only imagine what it was like,” to carry the symbolic weight of modernising the monarchy through their marriage. Meghan and Harry first revealed he had given them a place to stay in their interview with Oprah in 2021, which sent shockwaves across the nation.

They provided even more detail about their friendship with Perry in their six-part documentary series, which the filmmaker also appeared in. He candidly admitted that he was happy to accept being Lilibet’s godfather, just so long as he didn’t have to engage in a royal christening in the UK, and spoke scathingly about the ways in which he believed the couple were being”abused”, pressured to “comply” and return to the UK when he helped them in 2020. “To use the institution to try and do all the things a batterer would do, like,” Perry said, “here’s what we’re gonna do, ‘we’re gonna cut off the money; we’re not gonna leave you security; we’re gonna do all those things to make you comply and come back’.”