Meghan Markle and Prince Harry shocked the world this week when they announced their decision to step back from their roles as senior royals. In a statement via Instagram, the couple said they’re working to become financially independent—and now, we might know how they’re taking steps to do that.
According to The Times, the Duchess, who worked as an actor before marrying her husband, reportedly signed a deal with Disney to do some voiceover work.
But here’s the thing: The Sussexes won’t be profiting from this deal. Instead, Disney has agreed to make a donation to Elephants Without Borders, an organization that helps protect the animals from poaching, in exchange for the Duchess’s work.
The report claims she recorded the voiceover prior to hers and Prince Harry’s six-week holiday in Canada.
Neither Disney nor Markle have confirmed such a deal exists and the details about the project have not yet been revealed, but it would mark the return of Markle’s acting career. This alleged collaboration also points to the pair’s desire to use their celebrity status to help their favorite charities and sheds some light on how the royals plan to support themselves—just as their bombshell announcement this week suggested.
This wouldn’t be the first time the pair have partnered with Disney. In July, Markle and Prince Harry attended the premiere of the The Lion King and after the birth of their son Archie, the company presented them with a personalized book featuring Winnie-the-Pooh and cartoon versions of the couple.
Following the pair’s announcement, Markle has returned to Canada to be with baby Archie.
As per their statement, they “plan to balance our time between the United Kingdom and North America” so they can raise their son “with an appreciation for the royal tradition into which he was born, while also providing our family with the space to focus on the next chapter.”
For her 27th birthday this past May, Lucia Allain traveled to the border. A citizen now, she’d grown up undocumented in New York City, a Peruvian immigrant whose mother worked so many hours and spoke so little English that it fell to Allain to attend parent-teacher conferences for her little brother. Birthdays weren’t really a thing. But this year, as part of the traveling she does for her job, she went to El Paso to collect the stories of asylum seekers who’d come to the United States for refuge. The people she met had been allowed in, for now—the fortunate few who would get to plead their cases. But with court dates far in the future, the migrants had been deposited at a bus station. These were stories not of the triumphant “good immigrant,” who’d started a small business or become a doctor or an engineer. Theirs were stories like her own, which so often go unheard.
Allain is the communications manager for RAICES, the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services. Founded in San Antonio in 1986 as waves of refugees migrated north, farther from the civil wars savaging Central America, RAICES provides legal services to immigrants in federal detention. It now has 11 offices across the state of Texas. The organization serves a range of clients—unaccompanied children, single adults, and families—but its employees are majority female, and women hold most of the leadership positions. Many come from immigrant families themselves.
Marie D. De Jesús
You know them. In April 2018, when the Trump administration instituted its “zero tolerance policy,” referring all adult migrants entering the country illegally for criminal prosecution, the Department of Homeland Security began separating them from their children and transferring children into the care of the Department of Health and Human Services. The nation erupted in collective outrage, and a new sense of urgency transcended borders both physical and political. When a Facebook fund-raiser was set up to help support RAICES bond out parents and reunite them with their children, the campaign took in more than $20 million in just over one week—that’s nearly three times the organization’s 2018 annual budget. It was the largest Facebook fund-raiser ever. Celebrities tweeted. Newspapers ran articles. Politicians took notice. Former San Antonio mayor and current presidential candidate Julián Castro, who’s made immigration central to his campaign, didn’t mince words. In an email he wrote, “At a time when immigrants and refugees are being vilified and attacked daily by the Trump administration, RAICES, and the women behind it, are ensuring the most vulnerable families are afforded their basic constitutional rights.”
It’s been a little more than a year since, and the administration’s assault on the nation’s immigrants continues apace, but so does the work of RAICES. On her birthday, then, collecting stories to help the world better understand that work, Allain wandered through the El Paso bus station, crammed with clusters of families forced into squalid conditions. There she met a young woman, tiny and vulnerable, holding a swaddled baby. Allain could see the journey in her face. The woman—let’s call her Luz—told Allain about the gang violence in Guatemala that she’d fled, and about how she had given birth five days before, on her own. With no one else to do it, she’d cut the umbilical cord herself. Now she needed diapers. She needed to wash. She was hungry but she had no food. Give me your tired, your poor… Allain gave Luz her lunch and held the swaddled baby so she could eat.
Mariah Carey is an absolute goddess, and we don’t deserve her. She’s proved this time and time again—whether at a Fourth of July barbecue, crouching near a popcorn maker to find perfect lighting, or during her two New Year’s Eve performances. If you still need convincing, though, look no further than to her video for the #BottleCapChallenge, the internet’s latest viral hashtag in which people post videos of themselves kicking the tops off bottles.
But Carey didn’t kick anything. (She’s a legend, and legends always do things differently.) Instead, she simply belted out her signature whistle tone, and the cap went flying all on its own. Yup! Let me reiterate: goddess. Superhero! Otherworldly! A national treasure!
Okay, so this isn’t technically what happened. Clearly someone fastened a string onto the bottle cap and pulled it the second Carey started singing. Nevertheless, the video is still iconic and by far the most creative #BottleCapChallenge entry. Mariah Carey nailed this one, guys. She won. It’s official.
Watch the magic go down for yourself in the video, below. “Challenge accepted,” Carey wrote.
In a separate tweet she added, “Well, that was fun! my next challenge is trying to get my kids off their iPads.”
Other celebrities have completed the #BottleCapChallenge as well, though their submissions are nowhere near as incredible as Carey’s.
Chrissy Teigen has lost her voice. “I’m so sorry,” she rasps as we sit in a tiny Korean restaurant in New York City. Since giving birth to Miles, her second child with husband John Legend, in May, the 33-year-old model turned TV host turned everyone’s favorite social media spirit animal has been readjusting to her jet-setting schedule. “Everything is totally hitting me, and I’m very overwhelmed, and it’s like my body can’t take it,” she says, picking up the menu. Fortunately there’s a temporary balm for this condition. “Do you want a glass of wine?” she asks, her eyes glinting. As the waiter deposits two large glasses of sauvignon blanc on the table, she has three words: “Yes, please, God.”
It’s a little after noon on Wednesday, but for Teigen it’s already been a week: Three days prior she accompanied Legend to the Creative Arts Emmys, where he became the first African American man to achieve full EGOT. Then she flew to New York to promote her second book of maximalist recipes, Cravings: Hungry for More. But it was the latest episode of Lip Sync Battle, the celebrity “singing” competition on which she appears as host LL Cool J’s hype woman, that did her voice in. Producers arranged an on-air celebration for her mom, a Thai immigrant who recently became an American citizen. “She was so happy,” Teigen says, choking up a little as she flicks through pictures on her iPhone of her mom onstage with a dancer dressed as Times Square’s famous Naked Cowboy. “You forget, as crazy as the world seems right now, people are still extremely excited to be a part of this country,” she says. “I thought she was going to sob. And instead she just hit the Naked Cowboy’s butt.”
PHOTO: Tom Schirmacher in New York City. Stylist: Michaela Dosamantes; hair: Gavin Harwin at The Wall Group; makeup: Patrick Ta at Greyscale; manicure: Dawn Sterling at Statement Artists; set design: Maria Santana at Art Department. Solace London sweater. Rachel Comey skirt. Eres briefs. J.Hannah hoops. Jane D’Arensbourg ring.
Now we know where Teigen gets her ability to land a punch line. She may be vocally compromised at the moment, but her nearly 11 million Twitter followers can count their lucky stars that she still has her fingers, which are just as itchy as the current president’s. When President Trump tweeted, “We must keep ‘evil’ out of our country!” in 2017, she replied, “What time should we call your Uber?” It’s digital bons mots like this that earned her the title of Twitter’s “undisputed queen” from none other than BuzzFeed, which does brisk business aggregating her observations into lists with titles like “100 Hilarious Chrissy Teigen Tweets We Honestly Need to Talk About More.” She’s just as candid in real life—on the Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen after-show, she revealed she and Legend did it on their first date.
“When I look at the most successful people around me, I feel like they all had plans,” Teigen says. “But I never had a plan. Never.”
“I enjoy talking to people and feeling like I know them,” Teigen says. “I always have.”
Johanna Ortiz top, $995. Theory slipdress, $395. Ariana Boussard-Reifel earrings, $325. Jimmy Choo mules, $625.
In an age when celebrities carefully guard their words, her candor connects. “I think the thing that resonates is that she is 100 percent authentic,” says Teigen’s longtime hairstylist, Jen Atkin. “She’s really tweeting like no one’s watching.” These days Teigen has graduated from posting about being hungover and puking into a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos to real talk about everything from breastfeeding struggles to dealing with mommy shamers. Her ability to share these universal truths with humor has challenged the boundaries of what’s appropriate for mothers in the public sphere. And her openness about late-onset postpartum depression has helped shed light on an issue that too often goes undiscussed. “I think the most surprising thing for me was that it happened three months after,” says Teigen, who was on the set of Lip Sync Battle dressed as Eleven from Stranger Things when she realized something was amiss. “I thought postpartum was, you have the baby and you’re sad. It was like, no. It sneaks up on a lot of people. That’s why I thought it was important for me to talk about.”
Our lives would be so much easier if we didn’t dabble in politics at all, but I don’t want that kind of life. For us, we’re willing to take that risk, because we believe in it so passionately.
Growing up in Snohomish, Washington, a farm town 45 minutes north of Seattle, Teigen never imagined she’d be in a position to change cultural conversations. “When I look at the most successful people around me, I feel like they all had plans,” she said. “But I never had a plan. Never. I used to be on antianxiety medication because I was confused. I didn’t know where I was going in life. All I knew when I was younger, or when I was 18, was that I wanted kids and a husband.” Even after her family relocated to Huntington Beach, California, and she began working as a catalog model, her aspirations remained modest. “Maxim Hometown Hottie,” she says. “That was the dream.”
Instead she landed the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, which was perhaps more wholesome. “Sports Illustrated was so good for me, just because they put more focus on personality,” she says. “I never saw it as a jerk-off moment. I never thought about a man flipping these pages and looking at me and being like, Yeah. For me it was like, ‘I want to be the chick that I want other girls to see and be like.’” She remembers living “week to week” and taking opportunities as they came—like appearing in the video for Legend’s 2007 “Stereo,” which featured Teigen writhing against the singer in what, thanks to Andy Cohen, we now know to be foreplay.
Self-Portrait dress, $430. J.Hannah hoops. Annika Inez glass necklace, $295. Louise Olsen necklace, $180, gold ring, $180. Jane D’Arensbourg ring, $132. BCBG Max Azria sandals, $198.
At first Teigen was intimidated by Legend, a “brainiac,” as she puts it, who started attending an Ivy League school at age 16. In 2009 she accompanied him to the Time 100 gala. “It was a table of, like, Oprah, Michelle Obama, and this woman who ran an incredible charity about sex trafficking in Southeast Asia,” she recalls. “At this point, I wasn’t anything. I remember going back to his dressing room and sobbing.” That same month Teigen found her voice on social media. “Puddy just bit my nipple and I think it’s gone,” she tweeted, referring to her now deceased bulldog, “are these the kind of updates Twitter wants?”
The answer: a resounding yes. “It’s weird to think about now, but that was sort of the first time someone on the page had a voice,” says Teigen’s friend and fellow Sports Illustrated cover girl Brooklyn Decker. “Models were still kind of a figment of other people’s imaginations, and all of a sudden here is this incredibly bright, incredibly candid person who people connected to in a really big way.” Not everyone in Teigen’s life understood the appeal. “People are like, ‘Why do you have time for all of these strangers?’” she says. “But that is my outside connection to the world. I genuinely love doing it. I always have. I enjoy talking to people and feeling like I know them and having this conversation.”
While Teigen’s “smart mouth,” as her husband famously put it, has provided relief to many, it’s also earned her a few enemies. After a tweet in support of gun control led to threats, Teigen briefly abandoned the platform. It’s a moment she’ll never forget. “That’s when it gets scary, because we have kids,” she says. She and Legend have considered taking things down a notch. “Our lives would be so much easier if we didn’t dabble in politics at all,” she says, “but I don’t want that kind of life. For us, we are willing to take that risk, because we believe in it so passionately.” This year, in honor of Trump’s seventy-second birthday, she and Legend donated $288,000—$72,000 for each member of their family—to the ACLU in his name. “We’re still just as fucking angry as we were a year ago,” she says, “but instead of just tweeting about it or creating a hashtag, it’s about what we can do to make it better.”
So is it safe to say that these days Teigen knows her worth? She drains her glass of wine. “I still don’t know my exact job title,” she says. “I have no idea what is going to happen six months from now. I don’t know anything. But maybe that’s the way it works for a lot of people. And I’m OK with that.”
Jessica Pressler is contributing editor at New York magazine.
Hair: Gavin Harwin at The Wall Group; makeup: Patrick Ta at Greyscale; manicure: Dawn Sterling at Statement Artists; set design: Maria Santana at Art Department.
Riverdale stars Lili Reinhart and Cole Sprouse haven’t said the words “We’re dating” yet, but there’s plenty of evidence on social media that suggests they’re at least more than friends. Take Sprouse’s Instagram post from September 13, for example, in which he calls Reinhart his “muse” and his “love.” Reinhart said something similar to Sprouse on Instagram for his birthday in August, writing, “I’m so thankful that our paths intertwined to form this beautiful adventure. Happy birthday, my love.” I think it’s safe to say these two are quite found of each other—and have no problem talking about it.
But this wasn’t always the case. In fact, Reinhart’s first impression of Sprouse wasn’t exactly positive. “I thought his voice was annoying,” she tells Glamour in the video, above. “That was my first impression. I was like, ‘That guy’s got an annoying voice.’ And now it’s grown on me.”
This is just one of many things Reinhart and Sprouse say about each other in this video. We had both them and three of their other costars—Casey Cott, Madelaine Petsch, and Vanessa Morgan—complete friendship exercises, and the result is just delightful. It’s beyond clear from this eight-minute clip that this cast thinks the world of each other, which makes their chemistry on Riverdale all the more sweet.
“[Lili is] one of those people that consistently pushes me to be better at the arts that I’m pursuing, and that’s just the kind of person she is,” Sprouse says about Reinhart at the beginning of the video. “She inspires excellent out of everybody she works with.”
Watch more of these friendship exercises for yourself, above.
Taylor Swift doesn’t sing the first word in her new song “Gorgeous”—a baby does. Like, a literal baby. No one knows whose baby this is. Maybe it’s Blake Lively and Ryan Reynold’s toddler, James. (That’s the popular theory right now, at least.) Maybe it’s a showbiz baby whose job is to say cute words in pop stars’ songs. Is this the same baby who Madonna Autotuned crying for her unreleased song “Autotune Baby?” The one who tells Christina Aguilera she “owns the throne” in “Vanity?” Who knows, man. Your guess is as good as mine.
One mystery fans are making headway in solving, however, is why Swift chose to include a baby’s pipes in “Gorgeous.” It’s a strange choice at first listen, but a closer look at the song’s lyrics helps connects the dots.
In the song, Swift waxes poetic about how she’s furious she can’t act on her feelings for a new guy because she has a boyfriend. “You should take it as a compliment/That I got drunk and made fun of the way you talk,” she sings at the top of the track. “You should take it as a compliment/That I’m talking to everyone here but you,” she muses later. These are both pretty immature ways to deal with emotion—it’s almost like she’s back in high school—but a Reddit user theorizes this is completely intentional. Yup.
According to them, this is Swift’s way of showing that love and crushes can easily turn adults into babies. They lose sight of logic and simply obsess over what they want but can’t have—just like a young child complains about wanting candy or toys or a later bedtime. To drive this point home even further, Swift added an actual baby’s voice to the song. She’s the baby here, according to the Reddit user. (Well, that’s what this dude’s turning her into, at least. And, let’s be honest, we’ve all been there.)
Here’s the theory in the Redditor’s words:
“She realizes that she’s extremely attracted to him and interested in
him, but also acknowledges that these thoughts are wrong considering
she is not broken up with the other guy,” the Redditor writes. “This
seems like a scenario that could happen to any person, at any
age…She also admits there is nothing she wants more than what she
can’t have, like a child upset over not getting a toy that they want.
They continue, “Yes, these feelings of displacing blame on another
person and viewing someone as a thing she can’t have are childish. But
that still doesn’t mean at 27 she can’t feel them. I think the child’s
voice in the beginning is no coincidence but an allusion to her
self-awareness that these feelings are pretty juvenile.”
Makes sense, right? Leave it to Swift to turn a baby’s coos into social commentary.
