2006 was a dispiriting year for both Trevor and Meghan. He had been the Executive Producer of Zoom, a $75.6m budget superhero action movie/comedy starring Courtney Cox, Chevy Chase and Rip Torn. Despite their high hopes, the film took the princely sum of $12.5m at the box office, was universally panned as being dull and anything but funny, and had the further distinction of its lead actor, Tim Allen, being nominated for a Razzle Award in the Worst Actor category.
At this time, Meghan had landed a role as a briefcase girl on the game show Deal or No Deal. This brought her a steadier and larger income than she had ever had, but was, by her own account, a daily reminder that she was nowhere near where she wanted to be professionally.
By the following year, things were looking up for Trevor once more. He co-produced Licence to Wed, a romantic comedy starring Robin Williams, then started work as Executive Producer on the Sandra Bullock/Bradley Cooper comedy All About Steve. Meanwhile, Meghan bounced along on the bottom of the barrel, getting yet more bit parts until in 2010 Trevor landed the job of producer of Remember Me, a melodrama starring British heartthrobs Robert Pattinson and Pierce Brosnan. Finally, Trevor offered her a part, and while it was not a large one, she nevertheless had hopes that it would lead to bigger things. It did not, and not because the film was panned for its ending, which involved 9/11, but because Meghan’s attributes remained unacknowledged.
Despite this, she remained hopeful, and her relationship with Trevor was stronger than ever. According to Nikki Priddy, who remained Meghan’s closest friend while also having become a close friend of Trevor’s, they were so completely in love, so well suited, that she could never have imagined either of them with anyone else.
Time, however, was running out for Meghan. She was approaching thirty. She had not yet made it. She had no ambitions to become a character actress though she hankered after having her acting talent recognised as if she were one of the greats like Eleanora Duse, Anne Bancroft or Patty Duke. She wanted to be a star. And she was no nearer achieving her objective than she had been when she had started out acting in school. Then along came the part for which nature, nurture, and her own character and personality made her ideal. Rachel Zane was a tough, ball breaking, bold, elegant, standoffish, competent, intelligent, but flawed paralegal at an upscale law firm. She had to be good looking, but not so good looking that she stole the show. She had to be sexy enough to capture the love interest of one of the stars, Patrick J Adams, who was playing Mike Ross, but not so sexy that she came across as tarty. She had to be refined enough to convey a background of privilege. She had to be cool and convincing, for Rachel had garnered the respect of her colleagues, all of whom admired her legal ability even though she could not pass her law exams.
Meghan’s agent Nick Collins of the Gersh Agency had put her up for the role, and while she thought her reading had gone so badly that she asked him to arrange a second one, it had actually gone well. ‘They loved my take on Rachel and they were putting together a deal for me. It was a really good lesson in perspective. I think we are always going to be our own worst critics,’ she said, an observation she would have done well to remember when she became the Duchess of Sussex and things started to go badly awry for her.
According to Jeff Wachel, co-president of the USA Network, ‘One of the things that we needed at the beginning of Suits was Patrick’s character to come in as the hottest thing in town: he’s brilliant, has a photographic memory and fakes his way into being a lawyer and then comes up against this girl who turns out to be the love of his life. We needed somebody who had a real authority to shut him down and still be the coolest thing around.’ Finally, Meghan’s characteristics in all their contradictory complexity had come to her rescue.
When Nick Collins rang Meghan to tell her that she had got the part, she was ecstatic, but reservedly so. She had previously had her hopes dashed when stardom had seemed assured and, lest history repeat itself, she now refused to let her expectations run away with her the way they had in the past. Nevertheless, she looked forward to the filming of the pilot in New York in autumn. Neither she nor Patrick J. Adams could be sure whether it was a good omen that they had once worked together on another pilot: one which amounted to nothing. This time, however, all the ingredients for success were there.
Nor was success limited to what was happening on the screen. At the end of the shoot, Meghan and Trevor flew to Belize, where he asked her to marry him. She accepted without demur. She was ‘marrying up’, her brother Tom Jr observed approvingly, but Trevor was also nailing her down in case she became the star she had always wanted to be.
Between the proposal and the marriage, Meghan received the news that filming for the first series of Suits would begin in Toronto on the 25th April 2011. The only downside was that she and Trevor had to commute between there and California, but she was intent on making her relationship with him and the series work, and happily threw herself into both.
