‘I Wanna Marry ‘Harry’ Turns 10: Where Are They Now?
A decade ago, years before Prince Harry started dating now-wife Meghan Markle, a different “Harry” dated a different Meghan on the Fox reality show I Wanna Marry “Harry.” Meghan Ramsey Jones was one of 12 American women competing for the affection of a redheaded man named Matthew Hicks, whom the woman thought was Harry.
At least, that was the premise of the show. In actual reality, some of the contestants knew Hicks wasn’t a British royal, including winner Kimberly Birch, who told Business Insider that the jig was up for her when she passed a London store window and spotted a mask depicting the real Harry.
In that Business Insider first-hand account and other interviews online, former contestants said producers isolated them from the outside world and each other, hired security guards for “Harry,” recruited fake fans and fake paparazzi to hound the fake prince, left fake tabloids strewn about, and even faked a photo of Hicks with Prince William.
Birch even told Splinter in 2015 that a therapist came on set to talk to skeptical contestants during filming. “We found out later that it wasn’t a real, licensed therapist,” she said. “It was just someone from the production team.”
I Wanna Marry “Harry” debuted on May 20, 2014, and aired only four episodes in the U.S. before getting dethroned by Fox. Ten years later, some of the people involved are still in the spotlight, and some are still talking about their brush with faux-royalty. Check out their stories below.
Matthew Hicks
As of a 2020 Refinery29 oral history about the show, the “Sir” passed off as a prince on I Wanna Marry “Harry” was working with a behavioral unit in a school and was pursuing a career as a physics teacher.
“I just thought the whole thing was ridiculous to be honest,” he told the site, reflecting on his time on the show. “I was quite happy just going back to my old job and cracking on with my life.”
Kimberly Birch
Birch and Hicks split the show’s £250,000 prize and went their separate ways afterward, only reconnecting for promotional opportunities.
She later earned a Master of Arts in drama therapy — telling Refinery29 she “wrote [her] thesis on the show, on brainwashing” — and started a career as a New York-based actor.
“[The show] taught me a lot about brainwashing because your reality is being screwed with,” Birch told Scott Bryan, host of the new podcast The Bachelor of Buckingham Palace, per The Guardian.
“You’re not trusting yourself anymore. It is this group consciousness believing what everyone else was believing in order to feel sane. I can see how people are very easily manipulated, even into things like cults … I get where they’re coming from.”
Meghan Ramsey Jones
Jones is the lifestyle blogger behind the website The Meghan Jones, according to Refinery29. She told the site that she never thought Hicks was actually Harry and that she played along with the ruse for the exposure, explaining that her reality TV fame led to her getting a morning radio show and a morning TV show.
But Bryan reported Jones was, in fact, affected by the brainwashing. “At the end of the day, if someone is feeding you a s***burger, and every day everyone around you is telling you: ‘It’s ground beef, it’s ground beef, it’s ground beef!’, you start wondering: ‘Wow, is this s***burger really ground beef?’” she told him (per The Guardian).
Rose Copeland
Copeland, now Rose Bricklin, is now a full-time mother, according to Refinery29. She told the site that her refusal to believe that Hicks was Prince Harry led to her elimination from the show — but her on-air confrontation of Hicks was edited together by producers, she said.
“When people first started saying they thought it was Prince Harry, I right away was like, Oh my God, no, you can’t be that dumb,” Bricklin recalled, adding that she pulled other contestants into the bathroom to tell them the show was a lie. “The producers did not want me doing that,” she said. “They made it clear [that] everyone’s allowed to think who they think it is [and] it’s not your place to say.”
Paul Leonard
Leonard, who played the butler Kingsley on the show, has been acting onscreen for nearly 50 years now.
He recently played Lord Beric Dondarrion in House of the Dragon and James Stonehouse on Doctor Who on TV, for example, while his film work includes The Witches and Darkest Hour.
Ryan Seacrest
Seacrest, one of the I Wanna Marry “Harry” producers, continues to host American Idol and Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve on TV and American Top 40 and On Air With Ryan Seacrest on radio. He recently gave up his Live With Kelly and Ryan talk show gig, but he’ll soon replace Pat Sajak as host of Wheel of Fortune.
Danny Fenton (not pictured)
Fenton, the creator of the series, has gone on to executive-produce dozens of unscripted shows and TV documentaries, including the recent series The Interrogation Room Hosted by Vivica A. Fox, Laura Whitmore Investigates, and Rob Rinder’s Interrogation Secrets.
In April, Fenton’s Zig Zag company shut down its production arm. “Due to well-publicised market conditions and a global slowdown of commissioning, we are in the unenviable position of restructuring our group of companies and, as a result, placing Zig Zag Productions into an insolvency process,” Fenton told Deadline at the time.
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