Brooke Shields didn’t hold back when sharing comments about Meghan Markle’s awkward appearance at a 2024 SXSW panel.
The actress, along with the Duchess of Sussex, participated in an International Women’s Day conversation called “Breaking Barriers, Shaping Narratives: How Women Lead On and Off the Screen” and moderated by journalist Katie Couric at the iconic film festival last March.
“Katie asks the first question to Meghan and she talks about how at a young age, she was already advocating for women,” Shields told India Hicks on the latest episode of her “An Unexpected Journey” podcast, via the Independent.
“She starts telling a story about how when she was 11 — and she keeps saying, ‘Well, when I was 11, I saw this commercial and they were talking about how washing dishes was for women’ And she said, ‘I didn’t think only women wash dishes. It wasn’t fair, so I wrote to the company.’”
“She kept saying she was 11!” the “Mother of the Bride” star exclaimed.
“She wrote to the company, they changed the text, they changed the commercial. It was just too precious, and I was like, ‘They’re not going to want to sit here for 45 minutes and listen to anybody be precious or serious.’”
Shields, 60, recalled intervening at one point in an effort to switch up the mood.
“I go, ‘Excuse me, I’m so sorry, I’ve got to interrupt you there for one minute.’ I was trying not to be rude, but I wanted to be funny because it was so serious,” Shields remembered.
“I just want to give everybody here a context as to how we’re different. When I was 11, I was playing a prostitute,” she joked, referencing her 1978 historical drama, “Pretty Baby.”
“The place went insane,” Shields shared, claiming the crowd became “more relaxed” after her comments.
The story Markle shared during the panel was nothing new, as the “Suits” alum has previously spoken about how she took matters into her own hands after seeing the controversial Ivory dishwashing soap campaign.
During the 2019 International Women’s Day panel at SXSW, Markle said the ad — which originally featured the slogan “Women all over America are fighting greasy pots and pans” — had inspired a formative feminist experience for her.
“Truth be told, at 11 I don’t think I even knew what sexism meant. I just knew that something struck me internally that was telling me it was wrong, and I knew that it was wrong,” she said at the time, per People.
“And using that as my moral compass and moving through from the age of 11, at that age I was able to change this commercial. It really set up the trajectory for me to say, ‘If there was a wrong, if there is a lack of justice, and there is an inequality, then someone needs to do something. And why not me?’”
Ultimately, Procter & Gamble (the company who owns Ivory) changed the slogan to “People all over America are fighting greasy pots and pans.”
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