Meghan: A Hollywood Princess(31)
Their on-screen intimacy led to speculation that the pair had fallen into the trap of many costars: Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz. In fact, the Canadian-born Adams had fallen for an earlier female lead, Troian Bellasario, the daughter of producers Donna Pratt and Donald P. Bellasario, who played opposite him in 2009 in the play Equivocation. They fell in love, but after a year they broke up, Bellasario going on to win a role in the first season of Pretty Little Liars. In a move that his Suits character Mike Ross would have approved of, Adams devised a cute way of winning back the showbiz heiress. He quietly scored a bit part on Pretty Little Liars and then joined his surprised ex-girlfriend on set at the table read-through. His ploy worked: the couple reunited, eventually became engaged in 2014, and married in 2016.
While the “will they, won’t they” romance between Rachel and Mike gave the show its sexual tension, it was the other man in Rachel’s life, her father, a powerful rival lawyer played by African American actor Wendell Pierce, who really caught the attention of the show’s 4 million strong audience.
As the story develops, we learn that Rachel, much to the disappointment of her successful and wealthy father, is stuck as a paralegal because she just can’t pass the law school entrance exam, the LSAT. While her character has some daddy issues, it was Rachel Zane’s biracial heritage that stirred controversy, with both African American and white viewers confused that a girl who looked so white had a black father. One fan asked if she was adopted, while others were more hostile about the fictional paralegal’s heritage, exposing an ugly, racist side in the show’s viewership. Even though the American president himself was biracial, the decision by the show’s producers to cast a woman of mixed race as a modern-day equivalent of a conventional upper-class white woman helped move the dial a little with regard to racial stereotypes and traditional images of beauty.
As the show’s popularity grew, Meghan and her colleagues were asked to build a following using social media in order to help with ratings. Even though she had never heard of Instagram, she found herself opening an account and posting photographs from her private life. What began as a chore turned into an enjoyable and highly addictive daily habit, the actor building up an amazing 1.9 million followers by the time she closed the account. Her first image on May 24, 2012, showed her Suits script from the episode “Break Point”; a copy of Forbes, the American business magazine; as well as liberal TV commentator Rachel Maddow’s first book, Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power, about the rise of presidential authority and the diminution of Congress. With her Instagram debut Meghan was demonstrating that here was an actor with brains as well as beauty who was involved and engaged in the world around her. Subsequent posts would be less forthright, featuring favorite food, engaging selfies, travels abroad, and images of Toronto. It was a curated, very considered vision of her private world.
Her involvement in the outside world was not just through the distorting prism of Instagram. She took part in a USA Network campaign against racism, appearing on screen in Characters Unite, an award-winning public service program created to address the social injustices and cultural divides. Wearing a T-shirt with the words I WON’T STAND FOR RACISM, she encouraged people to stand together against prejudice while sharing her experience of being a fly on the wall while white people told black jokes or made bigoted remarks.
Closer to home the actor volunteered to help at a local Toronto soup kitchen for the homeless, the St. Felix Centre, which was founded by the Felician Sisters. She asked the show’s producers if at the end of the day they would donate any leftover food from the craft service, the daily unlimited buffet of snacks designed to fuel the actors and crew through the shoots. They were happy to agree to her request, the Suits family also making a substantive cash donation to the homeless charity.
The cast and crew were also encouraged to bond, to be a family. It helped all round. A happy set was a productive set. They formed a tight-knit group, bicycling places and going out for drinks or dinner, playing board games and drinking whisky, as one cast member recalled, “into the wee hours.” The cast vacationed together over Canadian Thanksgiving, Meghan bringing her Vitamix super-blender to whip up soups and cocktails for the group. It was during one of these group get-togethers that Meghan was inspired to take what turned out to be her favorite vacation of all time. During a casual conversation with Meghan’s costar Gabriel Macht, he told her that he and his wife loved RV vacations. After listening to him wax lyrical about a trip to New Zealand, Meghan decided to follow suit. She and Trevor too rented a RV and spent two weeks driving around New Zealand’s sparsely populated South Island. They went hiking over glaciers, visited wineries in Marlborough, and rented a beach house for a few days. She vividly remembers the extraordinary night they pulled up at a campsite in Akaroa, a tiny village surrounding a dead volcano. As she later recalled: “I was washing my hair and I hear something and I open the shower curtain and there is this 13-year-old boy who had crawled under the stall and was trying to steal my underwear. I grabbed my towel and I had shampoo in my hair and I yelled: ‘Where is your mother?!’ I found his parents and they were mortified of course. And to this day, oh my god, that kid will be sitting at home going ‘that’s the girl from Suits, I saw her naked!’” Now, of course, he will be able to boast that he saw a Hollywood princess in the buff. In spite of her encounter with this junior Peeping Tom, she voted the vacation one of the best trips of her life.