Meghan Markle’s ‘Suits’ co-star shares racy set photo years later

She may be a duchess, but she’s just Meghan to him.

Meghan Markle’s “Suits” co-star Patrick J. Adams took a walk down memory lane sharing behind-the-scenes photos Monday on his Instagram account from their time on the hit USA Network legal drama series.

Adams played Mike Ross, a street smart college dropout who lands a high-profile legal job under Gabriel Macht’s Harvey Specter (in the middle of a drug deal) despite never having actually gone to law school.

The first photo features Adams in a black-and-white portrait intensely looking at the camera. The caption was simple: “Let’s get serious. Seriously.”

In the next photo shared on his “halfadams” social media account, the 42-year-old Canadian actor and director posted an image of Markle lying upside down on the floor in a white blouse and brown skirt with her bare foot raised in the air. In the photo, she’s seated next to her then co-star Sarah Rafferty, who played Donna Paulsen.

“I miss my friends,” Adams captioned the photo.

Markle, who was not yet the Duchess of Sussex at the time the photo was taken, played Rachel Zane on the series, the on-screen wife of Adams. The couple left the series at the end of Season 7 after their characters got married. They moved to Seattle to run a law firm together that focused on taking class action cases filed against Fortune 500 companies.

In the third and final post, Adams shared five black-and-white portraits of the main cast. In addition to a close-up of Markle, the tribute included images of Macht, Rick Hoffman, Max Topplin and Gina Torres.

The last caption completed Adams’ ultimate sentiment. “Each and every one of them,” he wrote.

“Suits” aired on USA Network from 2011 to 2019 for nine seasons. But it has experienced a resurgence in popularity after it began streaming on Netflix and Peacock in mid-June.

“The amount of exposure that we’ve had since getting on Netflix, I never in a million years could have anticipated,” “Suits” creator Aaron Korsh explained in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter. “A month or two before it went to Netflix, though, I started hearing from, like, somebody I went to high school with, or my dentist, whoever it was. It would be texts and emails saying that people’s high school- and college-aged kids had seen the scene from the pilot with Harvey [interviewing] Mike on TikTok and had been bingeing the show. So, something was happening even before it started on Netflix, and then Netflix just took it and amplified it by a billion.”  

Korsh also attributes some of the show’s recent popularity to Markle.

“I think why people are tuning into it is a combination of that TikTok thing, there’s no doubt that there’s some curiosity about Meghan, and then Netflix knows how to entice you to watch a television show and then that builds on itself,” Korsh explained. “Now, the reason I think people are responding to it? I don’t think it’s totally different from how I loved ‘Ted Lasso’ when it came out in the pandemic.”

He continued: “I think with the characters in ‘Suits,’ people either see themselves in someone and/or see who they wish they were, and it also has an inherent optimism to it, even though sad things do happen. It’s funny, I took a lot of heat over the years whenever something bad would happen to someone on the show, people really get upset about it. But in this period of time in the world, I think the characters and the underlying base optimism are why people are connecting to the show, and then maybe some of it is tonal because it has drama but also it has humor.”

After Markle filmed her final scenes in November 2017, she and Prince Harry announced their engagement. Many of Markle’s “Suits” co-stars were invited to their May 2018 royal wedding at St George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle.

In his 2023 memoir “Spare,” Harry spoke of his wife’s decision to leave the show.

“Meg packed up her house, gave up her role in ‘Suits.’ After seven seasons. A difficult moment for her, because she loved that show, loved the character she was playing, loved her cast and crew — loved Canada,” Harry explained. “On the other hand life there had become untenable. Especially on set. The show writers were frustrated, because they were often advised by the Palace comms team to change lines of dialogue, what her character would do, how she would act.”