She's back.
On Oct. 4, Spotify released the fourth episode of Meghan Markle's podcast Archetypes, the first to drop since she and husband Prince Harry attended the funeral of his grandmother Queen Elizabeth II on Sept. 19. On the show, titled "The Demystification of Dragon Lady," the Duchess of Sussex and celebrity guests Margaret Cho and Lisa Ling discuss the "archetypes that try to limit and define Asian women." Meghan notes two popular film franchises to illustrate her point.
"Movies like Austin Powers and Kill Bill, they presented these caricatures of women of Asian descent as oversexualized or aggressive," she narrates on the podcast. "And it's not just those two examples."
On the show, a clip is played from the 2002 comedy Austin Powers in Goldmember, in which Mike Myers' title character meets Fook Yu and Fook Mi, played by Dancing With the Stars judge Carrie Ann Inaba and Diane Mizota.
In an interview that year with Lollipop magazine, Mizota said, "I really make careful choices not to perpetuate Asian American stereotypes. I was worried about the Asian American community's reaction because they can be pretty vigilant about such things. But then I looked at it in context."
She continued, "[Director] Jay [Roach] and Mike are both big fans of Japanese anime, and that's sort of where the look of our characters is from. People have already remarked, 'Oh, you don't have an accent. You were so convincing.' I'm an actor. I'm American and this was a fun, fun part to play. I don't think you can really take anything in Austin Powers that seriously. It's a very difficult movie to take offense to. If these characters were in a different movie, I could totally see that they might be interpreted as offensive or stereotypical."
Also during her podcast, Meghan discusses the stereotype of the "Dragon Lady" on screen. "The East Asian temptress, whose mysterious foreign allure is scripted as both tantalizing and deadly," the duchess says on the episode. "This is seeped into a lot of our entertainment. But this toxic stereotyping of women of Asian descent, it doesn't just end once the credits roll."
The episode also features a clip from the 2003 film Kill Bill: Vol. 1, which stars Lucy Liu as antagonist O-Ren Ishii. A 2021 Teen Vogue essay titled "Hollywood Played a Role in Hypersexualizing Asian Women" alleges that the character constitutes a "contemporary example" of the "Dragon Lady" trope, one who is "cunning and deceitful" and "uses her sexuality as a powerful tool of manipulation, but often is emotionally and sexually cold and threatens masculinity."
But Liu challenged this notion in a Washington Post op-ed. "Kill Bill features three other female professional killers in addition to Ishii," she wrote. "Why not call Uma Thurman, Vivica A. Fox or Daryl Hannah a dragon lady? I can only conclude that it's because they are not Asian."
The actress continued, "If I can't play certain roles because mainstream Americans still see me as Other, and I don't want to be cast only in 'typically Asian' roles because they reinforce stereotypes, I start to feel the walls of the metaphorical box we AAPI women stand in."