Tyler Perry revealed what it was like having Meghan Markle and Prince Harry stay in his home after they left the British royal family.
He put Meghan and Harry up in his Beverly Hills mansion and even paid for a private security team after they stepped down from their royal roles in 2020, which meant they lost their state-funded bodyguards.
Perry revealed in the Netflix series that the famous couple managed to stay at his house for six weeks before the media realized.
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“Everyday I would look at Google, and ‘nope, they don’t know yet’. And you know, we would talk and they’d laugh, and they were doing so well. They’d send me videos,” Perry recalled.
But once their location became public, everything changed. The documentary showed how paparazzi relentlessly circled the house with helicopters and drones. Perry said he had never experienced such an intense amount of attention at the home.
“I’ve been in that house for many, many, many years, and across the canyon, there’s all these other celebrities and no one had seen an assault like this,” he explained in the series.
He later returned to the house with Harry and Meghan, where he spoke to them about the measures he went to in order to keep the paparazzi and intruders away.
“We would go up every day and the chain link on the fence would be cut and people would sneak in onto my property and to put all the cameras up on the hill there had to plant more trees. So it was just it was crazy,” Perry said, while standing in his yard with the couple.
Later in the sixth episode, Perry dropped the bombshell that the couple had asked him to be the godfather of their second child, Lilibet.
He recalled their usually casual tone had changed during one of their many phone calls.
“We’ll call and we’ll chat and we’ll talk about silly things,” he started.
“And they were pretty serious on the phone. So I go, ‘Okay, what’s going on?’ They said, ‘well we’d like for you to be Lili’s godfather,’ I go ‘whoa.’ I take a minute to take that in and I thought ‘I’d be honored, I’d absolutely be honored’.”
Perry then explained while he would be happy to be her godfather, he didn’t want to endure an official royal baptism in the U.K.
“And I got off the the phone, took it all in and I called them back. I go ‘hold on a second. Does this mean we got to go over there and do all of that in the in the church with them and to do all that out because I don’t want to do that. Maybe we can do a little private ceremony here and let that be that and if you have to do it there then it’s okay’.”
Fans watching the series quickly reacted on social media to Tyler’s revelations.
“Never forget that a Prince of the United Kingdom, 5th in line to the throne. Had to be saved by a black American man who had once been homeless, Tyler Perry,” tweeted one person.
Another added: “World History teachers in the year 2132 trying to explain the Tyler Perry plot twist in the chapter about Harry and Meghan’s escape from the royal family.”
And a third wrote: “the tyler perry reveal in the harry and meghan doc is cinema.”
Prior to living at his home, Perry and Meghan had never met face-to-face before he offered to support her and her husband.
The duchess revealed this fact in a candid interview with Allison P. Davis for The Cut.
“Though Meghan had never met Tyler Perry in person, he had reached out when she and Harry got married to tell her that he was praying for her ‘and that he understood what this meant,’ Meghan recalls, referring to the symbolic weight of their wedding, ‘and that he could only imagine what it was like,'” Davis wrote.
“He also told Meghan to call if she ever needed support or advice. It took her a long time to do so, she admits. But once she did, she found herself telling him every detail of their situation…”
Markle told Davis: “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.”
Harry and Meghan first moved to Canada after leaving the U.K where they had just been to discuss their future in the royal family with Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Charles and Prince William.
It was in this meeting that the decision was made that the couple would step down as working royals, move to North America and become financially independent.
Amid the impending COVID lockdowns and the media finding out the couple’s location in Canada, Perry offered them his Beverly Hills home.
Markle and Harry eventually moved into their own home in Montecito, Santa Barbara, near the houses of mega-celebrities Oprah Winfrey and Ellen DeGeneres.
