After Spotify cancelled Meghan Markle’s podcast, UTA CEO Jeremy Zimmer expressed his hatred for her at the 2023 Cannes Lions advertising festival.
When asked about Markle’s artistic abilities, Zimmer was forthright in his assessment: “As it turns out, Meghan Markle wasn’t exactly a prodigious audio artist or any sort of artist, for that matter.” He underlined that notoriety is not necessarily indicative of skill in any given subject.
Zimmer is a co-founder of UTA (1991) and counts such stars as Mariah Carey, Bryan Cranston, DJ Khaled, Chelsea Handler, and Kevin Hart among his clients.
Zimmer’s comments followed claims in The Post that Markle (then 41) and Prince Harry (then 33) had been dropped by Spotify due to their failure to fulfill the company’s performance requirements. The podcast “Archetypes,” which received widespread recognition in 2017, will not be returning for a second season because the pair could not produce enough episodes to guarantee a full multimillion-dollar payoff. In 2020, they struck a contract with Spotify worth more than $20 million.
Markle and Harry’s production firm, Archewell Audio, issued a statement saying they were leaving Spotify but were proud of the work they had done together on the series.
Twelve episodes made up Markle’s first season of the podcast, in which she spoke with celebrities like Serena Williams, Mariah Carey, and Paris Hilton. Markle is rumored to be looking into other streaming platforms in order to continue creating material for the dedicated “Archetypes” audience, despite her recent contract with Hollywood agency WME.
Podnews said that Markle’s staff secretly taped the broadcast and included her questions in the final episodes. In contrast, Andy Cohen, a guest on “Archetypes” in the month of November 2022, called the allegations against Markle “absurd” and confirmed that she had, in fact, performed the interview.
An insider at the time divulged that Harry, then aged 38, had presented Spotify with several novel ideas that were ultimately unsuccessful. His plan called for in-depth interviews with prominent figures such as Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin about how they overcame hardships in their formative years.