The Duke of Sussex has more beans to spill on both sides of the pond and these are the men posing the all-important questions
In the latest skirmish in his war for a quiet life, the Duke of Sussex has given several TV interviews, in both Britain and the US, ahead of the official publication of his memoir Spare. Given that Harry is perhaps the most clicked-on man in the Anglophone world right now, the question for his publicity team was not whether they could place an interview, but on which lucky broadcaster they would bestow the pleasure.
With the pick of the world’s journalists, we now know that Harry initially went for Tom Bradby and Anderson Cooper, who interviewed him for ITV and CBS, the American broadcaster, respectively.
Then came Michael Strahan on Good Morning America and ,finally, Stephen Colbert on CBS’s The Late Show. So who are these men and what did they do to deserve these sit-down chats with the ex-HRH?
Satirist, actor, TV presenter – Colbert does it all. He currently hosts the CBS show The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, a slot he took over from David Letterman in 2015.
Colbert has many TV credits but highlights include a scathing performance at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner in 2006, in front of then President George W. Bush, and hosting the Emmys in 2016. The 58-year-old has won nine Primetime Emmy Awards of his own, two Grammy Awards and three Peabody Awards. Colbert was named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People in 2006 and 2012.
A Catholic and a Southerner, Colbert is principally of Irish descent and one of 11 siblings. Early surgery left him deaf in his right ear. Like Meghan – though some years earlier – Colbert studied at Northwestern University. He is an ordained minister and has been married to Evie since 1993. The couple have three children and, like Michael Strahan, live in Montclair, New Jersey.
Colbert also knows what it’s like to have a best-selling book out; I Am America (And So Can You!) was a No.1 on The New York Times Best Seller list.
Like Harry, he has known childhood tragedy and trauma: when he was 10, Colbert’s father and two of his brothers died in an aircrash. Colbert has talked about his grief, and how he became detached, struggling to make friends. Instead he appears to have lost himself in science fiction and fantasy novels.
During his late teens and twenties, Colbert suffered from bouts of depression and anxiety, for which he had to be medicated. In a 2018 interview, Colbert told Rolling Stone: “I needed to be medicated when I was younger to deal with my anxiety that I had thrown my life away by attempting to do something that so few people actually get away with, or succeed at… Xanax was just lovely. Y’know, for a while.
“And then I realised that the gears were still smoking. I just couldn’t hear them anymore. But I could feel them, I could feel the gearbox heating up and smoke pouring out of me… I stopped the Xanax after, like, nine days. I went, ‘This isn’t helping.’ So I just suffered through it. I’d sometimes hold the bottle, to go like, ‘I could stop this feeling if I wanted, but I’m not going to. Because I know if I stop the feeling, somehow I’m not working through it, like I have got to go through the tunnel with the spiders in it.’
“And then one morning I woke up and my skin wasn’t on fire, and it took me a while to figure out what it was. I wake up the next morning, I’m perfectly fine, to the point where my body’s still humming. I’m a bell that’s been rung so hard that I can still feel myself vibrating. But the actual sound was gone [because] I was starting rehearsal that day to create a new show. And then I went, ‘Oh, my God, I can never stop performing.’ Creating something is what helped me from just spinning apart like an unweighted flywheel. And I haven’t stopped since.”
A former pro footballer, Strahan played for the New York Giants as a defensive end, and helped the Giants win Super Bowl XLII over the New England Patriots in his final season in 2008. Now a media personality and the co-host of Good Morning America, Strahan has won two Daytime Emmys and hosts the Pyramid game show for ABC.
The 51-year-old was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2014, and does charity work that benefits youth and community development, among other causes.
Strahan has quite a few claims to fame: he left the planet, as part of the third crewed flight by Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’s space tourism company, in December 2021. That means, at 6ft 5in, he holds the record as the tallest person to fly into space.
Like Harry, he can claim Royal roots. In his case, Anglo-Saxon ancestry that traces directly to Charlemagne, who is his great-grandfather x 39 (revealed in the US equivalent of the BBC TV series Who Do You Think You Are).
His love life has been somewhat chequered: two wives and then a failed engagement to Nicole Mitchell, Eddie Murphy’s ex-wife.
Perhaps it’s a shared love of philanthropy – or an interest in home design: Strahan organised a multi-million-dollar restoration of a 1906 New Jersey mansion and invited the public in for a month-long fundraiser in aid of children’s charities. The whole property was made over by 30 renowned New York and New Jersey interior and landscape designers. Strahan explained: “They’ll come in and decorate, paint the walls. They’ll hang the curtains, bring in furniture, light fixtures. None of it will be ours. When they’re done, if we want something, we get it at cost.”
As the host of ITV’s News at 10, Bradby, 55, is one of the most familiar faces on British television, a rosy-cheeked mix of gravitas and charm. He joined ITN as an editorial trainee in 1990 and has served the firm faithfully ever since. He worked as Ireland correspondent and Asia correspondent on his way up through the ranks. Bradby became royal correspondent soon after and stayed in the role until 2005, covering the Golden Jubilee and the funerals of Princess Margaret and the Queen Mother. He has presented the News at 10 since 2015 and anchored major events including the EU referendum in 2016, the American election in 2020 and Queen Elizabeth’s funeral earlier this year.
Like his interviewee, Bradby comes from a Forces family: his father served in the Navy, although never achieved as lofty a rank as Harry’s father. Bradby was educated privately, at Westbourne House and Sherborne, before studying at Edinburgh University. In 1999 he was shot in Jakarta, where he was reporting on the Indonesian riots. In 2018 he had a mental breakdown, the result of a prolonged battle with insomnia and consequent sleeping pill addiction, which caused him to take an extended break from work. He has a parallel career writing thrillers: he has now published nine novels. Shadow Dancer, his debut, was made into a film starring Clive Owen in 2012, and he wrote a drama about the Great Fire of London which aired on ITV in 2014. Since 1994 he has been married to Claudia, a jewellery designer, and they have three children.
Bradby’s friendship with Harry dates back to his time as a royal reporter, and was cemented in 2004, when he made a film about the Prince’s work in Lesotho. In happier times, Bradby had a good relationship with both William and Harry. He attended both weddings in a personal capacity, having landed the first interview with William and Kate after they announced their engagement. His wife, Claudia, worked at Jigsaw with Kate. But it has been reported that Bradby is persona non grata with William and Kate these days. He gave sympathetic coverage to Harry and Meghan over their decision to quit royal duties, especially a 2019 interview during their tour of Africa in which Harry said his brother and he were “on different journeys”. Bradby has said that his own mental breakdown made him treat Harry and Meghan more sensitively.
Bradby’s wardrobe is standard minor public schoolboy, with the expected added polish from seeing himself on-screen for three decades. In news anchor mode, he is always in a suit and tie, darker when the situation calls for gravitas. Tailored, but not too much. In dress-down mode, think Fulham dad in Tuscany: royal blue shirts unbuttoned not quite to the point of loucheness. His complexion has evolved, too: from the pale-faced innocence of his early reportage to the Blair-bronzed Adonis of his current pomp. One imagines a fresh coat of varnish will have been applied for the Harry chat.
Given Bradby’s personal history with both brothers, expect Bradby to dwell on Harry’s rift with William. In the trailer for the interview, Harry says “I would like to get my father back. I would like to have my brother back.” As a former royal correspondent, Bradby may also be more interested in Harry and Meghan’s giving up their royal duties, and their sense of duty towards the crown.
If modern American news broadcasting had a Mount Rushmore, Anderson Cooper’s face would be there, chiselled into the granite. For over 20 years Cooper, also 55, has been a regular face on CNN, beginning as a breakfast host before getting his own slot. He moved to Vietnam, where he started doing reportage, before covering conflict-torn Somalia, Bosnia and Rwanda in the early 1990s. In 1995 he joined the ABC network before moving to CNN after 9/11. He was widely praised for his impassioned coverage of Hurricane Katrina. In 2016 he became the first openly LGBT host of an American presidential debate. In total he has won 18 Emmys and 2 Peabody Awards. He has hosted 60 Minutes since 2006 and briefly hosted the game show Jeopardy!.
Cooper is himself as close as Americans get to royalty. His father was Wyatt Emery Cooper, a writer, and his mother was Gloria Vanderbilt, a socialite and the great-great-granddaughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt, the robber baron. The young Anderson was educated at private schools and Yale, and interned for the CIA before deciding to become a journalist. Anderson’s father died in 1978 and his older brother, Carter, committed suicide in 1988. Cooper has spoken extensively about loss and grief and in 2021 released All There Is, a podcast exploring the subject. He came out as gay in 2012, and he and his former partner, Benjamin Maisani, had two sons via surrogate, Wyatt, born in 2020, and Sebastian, born last year. “I think being gay is one of the blessings of my life,” he said in an interview in 2021. “And it made me a better person, it made me a better reporter.”
Cooper won an Emmy for his coverage of Princess Diana’s funeral and is probably the preeminent left-leaning American broadcast journalist. Among the American big beasts, he has a reputation for being a sensitive presenter, unafraid to build his own feelings into his reports, while his experience of grief and loss echoes Harry’s own. To give things an added frisson, Cooper’s great aunt, Thelma Furness, had an affair with the future Edward VIII in the 1920s and 30s, when he was the Prince of Wales. She was also responsible for introducing him to Wallis Simpson. A harmless coincidence, or a subtle reminder from Harry to his audience that, however scandalised people might be by his recent actions, things could be much worse.
Pure matinee idol. Not a hair out of place, not a blemish on the skin. As a boy, Cooper modelled for Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein, and the training tells, as does his aristocratic breeding. Beautifully tailored suits, shirts starched pure white, simple but elegant ties. Seems to favour the colour purple, perhaps as a regal complement to the silver hair. Don’t forget the thick-rimmed dark glasses, a vital prop for Cooper’s sharp-yet-soulful shtick. No English presenter has ever been this soigne, but then again on an English journalist it would look deeply suspicious.
As Cooper made an early name for himself covering Diana’s funeral, and has experience of losing a parent young, he may ask Harry more about his relationship with his mother and the loss he felt after her death. In the trailer for the CBS programme, Harry claims the palace was “leaking and planting” stories to brief against he and Meghan. Cooper, a fellow American, may be more sympathetic to Meghan’s dim view of the British press.
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