We’ve long maintained that Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s love story has not-so-subtle echoes of the teen movies we grew up on. Commoner falls in love with tearaway Prince? It’s a storyline straight out of The Prince and Me. Californian learns the ins-and-outs of a stuffy European monarchy? Paging Mia Thermopolis in The Princess Diaries… It’s hardly a surprise, then, to learn that the Lifetime Channel are pulling together a made-for-TV movie about the Prince and the Suits star’s courtship, set to broadcast on May 13th, just six days ahead of the royal wedding.
Now, with less than two months to go before the film’s release, the Lifetime Channel has dropped a 30-second trailer, which is just as speculative as the previously released teaser. Featuring some corkers from the character of Kate Middleton (‘She’s divorced, she’s American – are you ready for this?’ plus ‘Peter Pan can’t stay in Neverland forever, and marriage isn’t so bad”), plus a crescendoing soundtrack and cheesy moments a-plenty (hello, giraffe scene), it’s more than whet our appetite for the whole thing, due out 13 May.
Casting details for the project were announced by Lifetime earlier this year, revealing Parisa Fitz-Henley and Murray Fraser as our small screen Meghan and Harry. According to her IMBd page, Fitz-Henley has had a string of roles in American TV shows, the most prominent being in Netflix’s Jessica Jones and NBC’s supernatural drama Midnight, Texas. Fraser’s listing, meanwhile, features just two roles: in ITV’s Victoria and The Loch. In Fitz-Henley’s case, the resemblance is certainly there; in Fraser’s case… the jury’s out.
According to Deadline, the film will follow Harry and Meghan’s romance from the moment they met on a ‘blind date’ (how blind can a date be when one of the participants is the fifth in line to the throne of Great Britain?) through the early stages of their relationship, when they were able to keep things low key, and moving on to deal with the explosion of media attention which culminated in an engagement announcement from Clarence House last November. The industry bible also reveals that the film will deal with Meghan’s ‘life as a divorced American actress,’ whatever that means.
Of course, Lifetime is famed for casting relative unknowns (side note: Meghan has featured in a handful of movies broadcast on its near relation, the Hallmark Channel), but that can’t stop us wishing for Helen Mirren to drop in as the Queen 2.0, the lookalike from the infamous I Wanna Marry Harry reality show as the Prince and Meghan played by… Meghan Markle…
This article originally appeared on Grazia.
