Emmy nomination voting began last week, and the nominations will be announced on July 12th. Which feels later than usual, but I’m not an Emmy expert. Basically, the Emmy campaigns are going full-throttle right now, which is why there have been so many roundtable discussions and various actor-on-actor profiles in recent weeks. Well, it’s not just scripted dramas and comedies getting into the act – there’s a competitive field in the docu-series category, which is probably why Netflix asked Liz Garbus, director of Harry & Meghan, to do some interviews too. Garbus chatted with the LA Times this week, alongside executive producer Chanel Pysnik, and here are some highlights:

How Garbus came on board with the Sussexes: “If I’m approaching a documentary, I want to know if the folks I’m working with want to share — that they’re game. I had [already] gotten to know Meghan but wanted to have a sense of Harry’s point of view. I got on a Zoom with both of them and … just hearing the stories he had to tell, his desire for openness, his desire to get the story of the last several years of their lives out without the mediation of people with agendas and the British tabloids’ agenda of clickbait, I felt like, “Wow, here’s a story that obviously the whole world is fascinated by.” And that it can really operate on deep historical and cultural levels, too.

Pysnik on the Sussexes’ archives: One thing that was really unique to this project was how careful we had to be with the personal archive. Some of the things [Harry and Meghan] were sharing with us were very much never before seen .… We had to protect the archive in order to continue to build trust and honor the project. So there were a lot of [security] protocols put in place that, I think, went above and beyond what another project would probably do.

Garbus on whether they tried to get input from the British media: “We were trying to keep this project very low profile and under wraps until Netflix chose to announce it to the world, which was really close to when we aired. So the idea of going to tabloids in the U.K. was kind of a nonstarter.

Pysnik on what surprised her about H&M: “For me, it was very much their relationship together … and how they look at each other and interact. As we were crafting the arc of the series, the love story element as the through line just felt authentic and right, considering how beautiful it is to watch them together when they’re just at home or on Zoom or sitting on a couch.

What surprised Garbus: “I had kind of already built a basic relationship with Meghan over the prior year. I wasn’t a royal watcher … I didn’t have those preconceived notions. [Though] I guess I had, like, the vision of a stiff upper lip kind of family member. As everyone knows from our doc, Harry actually is very chatty, very communicative, emotionally intelligent, doing a lot of work on himself in terms of dealing with his past and dealing with being a man married to a woman of color in America. That definitely surprised me.

Whether the series helped or hurt the way the Sussexes are perceived in the UK: “One of the things that I explored in the show was that, in many ways, this was Harry’s journey. That Harry had this very fundamental primal trauma as a child and felt very clearly that the royal family did not protect his mother. And, as a child who loses a mother, there are things that aren’t forgivable. And I think that Meghan was on this journey with Harry, as opposed to her pulling Harry out of something that he would have stayed in were it not for her. Meghan really became the face of the blame for “destroying” something that the British public felt was so important to them. And then [add] throwing every misogynistic and racist trope into that — as has historically been the way women have been positioned in these kinds of narratives.

[From The LA Times]

The talk about the Sussexes’ personal photo archive is fascinating to me, because that’s what struck me about the series – how many photos we got to see which had never been released publicly. Meghan and Harry were dying to show off their wedding photos, as well as some of their family photos from Frogmore Cottage, Canada and Montecito. I wonder how many personal photos got left out of the series – considering Harry and Meghan’s Millennial need to document every single thing, I would imagine a lot of their photos never got used.

I also appreciate Garbus’s understanding of the racist and sexist tropes – or as Meghan would say, archetypes – being weaponized to attack Meghan simply because the British public and the British papers wanted to “blame” her for the Sussexit. And Garbus truly has no time or energy for the British media. Amazing.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images, Netflix.