Prince William Was Reportedly “Sick With Worry” Over This Prince Harry and Meghan Markle Interview
Royal biographer Christopher Andersen explained how the future king was “too distracted to think of food” ahead of time.

The Gist

• According to a new royal biography, Prince William was “sick with worry” ahead of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s 2021 bombshell interview with Oprah Winfrey.

• The future king was “retching” over the interview for a week ahead of its airing globally that March.

• Royal biographer Christopher Andersen pointed to a different interview that apparently got under Kate Middleton’s skin.

Ahead of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s bombshell 2021 interview with Oprah Winfrey, Prince William was “sick with worry,” a new royal biography claims.

In his book Kate!: The Courage, Grace, and Power of the Woman Who Will Be Queen, royal biographer Christopher Andersen wrote that the Princess of Wales “could hear her husband retching in the bathroom” for a week before the interview aired (per Page Six). The Prince of Wales was also reportedly “too distracted to think of food” while thinking about what his brother and sister-in-law might say as the world watched.

The explosive interview covered many bases, and included Harry saying of William that there was “a lot of hurt” between them.

As for Kate, a different interview—one much more recent—reportedly pushed the future queen to her “limits,” Andersen wrote. The interview in question was Harry’s May 2025 sit down with the BBC, where the Duke of Sussex said in part, “I don’t know how much longer my father has,” referring to King Charles’s ongoing cancer treatment (which continues up to the present day).

This made Kate “more disappointed than angry,” Andersen wrote (per Us Weekly). “But William, who had already slammed the door shut on his brother over what Harry wrote in Spare, was, in the words of a courtier, ‘apoplectic’ with rage.”

“Now it was time to nail the door shut once and for all, and for the first time Kate, who had worked harder than anyone to mend the rift between the brothers, willingly handed her husband a hammer,” Andersen continued.

“The damage was done: seeds of doubt concerning the King’s chances for a full recovery had been sown,” Andersen wrote, adding that the Princess of Wales “is ‘the sweetest, most loving person you could ever know,’ said a Sandringham staffer, ‘but like everyone else, she has her limits.’”

The king and the Princess of Wales shared their respective cancer diagnoses almost in tandem in early 2024. While the king’s cancer treatment continues, Kate announced in January 2025 that she is in remission.

“I think Kate’s relationship with her father-in-law over their shared cancer battles really has made her much more sensitive to King Charles’s feelings,” Andersen told Us Weekly. “She knows better than anyone that having someone publicly imply you may be at death’s door is horribly demoralizing.”

“I’m sure Kate must have felt stung by that comment as well, since she is in a situation very similar to the king’s,” Andersen said, noting that the future queen has always been the “levelheaded one” in the family, attempting to “bridge the widening gap between the brothers” in the past.