Carson Daly’s worries about royal protocol were quelled when Meghan Markle told him to greet her with a hug.
On Tuesday, October 10, Daly, 50, moderated a discussion with the Duchess of Sussex, 42, and Prince Harry during their Archewell Foundation summit in New York City — which he raved about the following morning on Today.
The former TRL host, who called the Sussexes “so great,” revealed to his Today show cohosts that he “didn’t know whether to curtsy or hug, like, what’s the royal rules and whatnot.” The Suits alum, however, came to the rescue. “Meghan [said], ‘Bring it in,’ [with a] big hug.”
Savannah Guthrie was impressed. “That’s really cool,” she told her colleague.
Meghan, for her part, previously opened up about her own difficulties learning royal protocol when she began dating Harry, 38, in 2017.
“Joining this family, I knew that there was a protocol for how things were done,” she shared in the couple’s Harry & Meghan docuseries in December. December 8. “Do you remember that old movie The Princess Diaries with Anne Hathaway? There’s no class [where] some person goes, ‘Sit like this, cross your legs like this, use this fork, don’t do this, curtsy then, wear this kind of hat.’”
She added: “So, I needed to learn a lot, including the national anthem. … It was baptism by fire.”
During Tuesday’s summit, both Meghan and Harry — who share son Archie, 4, and daughter Lilibet, 2, met with parents who suffered great losses related to the effects of social media.
“I think for us, for myself and my wife, with kids growing up in a digital age, the priority here is to again turn pain into purpose and provide as much support as well as a spotlight and a platform for these parents to come together, to heal, to grieve and to also collectively focus on solutions so that no other family anywhere has to go through what they’ve been through,” the prince said.
At the end of the event, Meghan told Daly that being a mom is the most important thing in my entire life — outside, of course, being a wife to this one,” she responded, while gesturing to Harry, to whom she has been married since 2018.
During their trip to New York — in honor of World Mental Health Day — Meghan and Harry also visited The Marcy Lab School in Brooklyn, which offers a one-year, tuition-free program that prepares young adults for careers in the tech field. The Sussexes, whose Archewell Foundation partnered with the school, spent time with current fellows of the program as well as alumni, posing for photos and learning how they are using technology for good.
