Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, is pivoting again, this time to Australian reality TV.
Meghan, an American actress who became part of the British royal family when she married Prince Harry in 2018, will be a “special guest” next year on “Junior MasterChef Australia,” according to Channel 10, which airs the show, Australia’s version of the popular cooking competition.
The channel said that a guest appearance by the duchess earlier this year on “MasterChef Australia,” the adult version of the competition, drew “the program’s largest Sunday audience since 2023.” Meghan, whose office released the same statement as was issued by Channel 10, said she had had an “incredible time” on the show.
“So when they approached me to come back and work with this young group of talent, it was an easy yes,” she said in the statement.
Since Meghan and Harry, the Duchess and Duke of Sussex, moved back to Britain from the United States earlier this year, there has been much speculation about their next moves. The two left Britain in 2020 in a public break with the royal family, giving up their loftiest titles and stepping away from their royal duties.
Over six years in California, the couple’s star power faded. Netflix chose not to renew a multimillion-dollar deal with them, and an arrangement with the audio platform Spotify fell short of expectations.
For Harry, returning to Britain meant a return to the charities that he had spent much of his life representing. For the couple’s children, Archie, 7 and Lilibet, 5, it has meant growing up in the homeland of their royal family. It was less clear what Meghan would do, though it was briefly rumored that she would join the cast of Guy Ritchie’s Netflix crime series “The Gentlemen.”
Even as a working royal, Meghan tried to maintain an independent career as an actress and a lifestyle entrepreneur. Though Netflix canceled “With Love, Meghan,” a show in which she presented herself as a domestic goddess in the mold of Martha Stewart, her product line “As Ever,” featuring items like raspberry jam and dried flower petals, is said to remain lucrative.
Meghan is no stranger to a TV kitchen. In 2016, before marrying Harry, she was a guest judge on “Chopped Junior,” a children’s cooking show on the Food Network in the United States.
“I love cooking with my own kids, so seeing what these young stars create in the kitchen is going to be a lot of fun,” Meghan said in the Tuesday statement.
The post Meghan, Actress Turned Duchess, Will Join Australian Cooking Show appeared first on New York Times.
