Prince Harry has spoken of going wild as he talked with a Hollywood star about their own drugs and alcohol problems.
The Duke of Sussex, 36, was speaking on actor Dax Shepard’s ‘Armchair Expert’ mental health podcast when he made the remarks.
Harry was questioning the star, who’s married to Frozen actress Kristen Bell, about the American’s substance use in high school.
The Royal asked him about Shepard’s awareness of what sparked his path towards drugs as a teenager.
Harry told him that for him it was his upbringing and everything that happened to him, the trauma, pain and suffering.
And he said that all of a sudden you find yourself doing a s*** load of drugs and partying hard, and that look at how many other people do that as well. They wouldn’t have the awareness at the time, and that he certainly wouldn’t have had the awareness when he was going wild.
And he said it’s like why am I actually doing this? But that at that moment it’s like, this is fun, and that in your 20s, it’s what you’re supposed to do.
Harry himself has been linked to smoking cannabis and drinking, and a recent Channel 5 documentary called Prince Harry: The Troubled Prince featured broadcaster Daisy McAndrew.
She told the programme, you can understand how a lonely, privileged troubled Prince would end up drinking and partying and taking cannabis to fill those hours and hang out with people he thought really liked or even loved him.
Prince Charles is understood to have taken the young Duke aged 16 to a residential centre for drug users for a visit after finding out, and reformed users at Peckham’s Featherstone Lodge warned him their addictions had begun with drinking alcohol and smoking cannabis.
Harry’s comments came on Shephard’s podcast where he bared his soul on his unhappiness in the Royal family.
He also said he was so desperate to conceal his relationship with Meghan when she stayed at Kensington Palace for the first time that they went incognito to the supermarket and pretended they didn’t know each other, texting shopping list items from various aisles.
Chatting with a slight American twang to his British accent, Harry said his life was like The Truman Show when Jim Carrey’s character discovers his life is a TV drama, as he discussed his emotional state and how he began therapy after Meghan saw he was angry.
And he’s like most stars who party around the world, in a balloon of bodyguards and a fixed number of friends, but unlike most celebrities, he never knew life before he became a superstar.
Of course, in the case of his family, it means that Harry has always been in the spotlight, and his every move has been scrutinised. Of course, he’s lived a pretty vested life, but you don’t choose the family that you’re born into.
And perhaps beneath all that pain, maybe he does fancy himself a little, and perhaps he was never remotely interesting, yet people are always somewhere talking about him.
I quite like Harry, not really sure about Meghan yet, but she’s his wife and he clearly loves his family.
And of course, losing your mother so young must have a lasting impact on your well-being, and living amongst the Royal family must have taken its toll, one where no one talks about their vulnerabilities and emotions.
Harry is clearly still exploring his vulnerability, but at least he’s on a journey to becoming wholehearted, and if he helps save one young life from drugs, he will have made a difference to that person and the world.
