Oprah Winfrey and Prince Harry will be executive producers of The Me You Can’t See, Apple TV’s upcoming show on mental health slated to premiere on May 21, the streaming giant announced on Tuesday.
Winfrey and the Duke of Sussex will guide discussions about mental health and emotional well-being while opening up about their mental health journeys and struggles.
“Now more than ever, there is an immediate need to replace the shame surrounding mental health with wisdom, compassion and honesty. Our series aims to spark that global conversation,” Winfrey said in a statement.
The show will feature “high-profile guests” like Lady Gaga, Glenn Close, San Antonio Spurs’ DeMar DeRozan, Phoenix Suns’ Langston Galloway (formerly of the Detroit Pistons), mental health advocate and speaker Zak Williams, Olympic boxer Virginia ‘Ginny’ Fuchs, celebrity chef Rashad Armstead and more, the statement listed.
The producers partnered with 14 accredited and respected experts and organisations from around the world to destigmatise a “highly misunderstood subject” that “transcends culture, age, gender and socioeconomic status”.
“We are born into different lives, brought up in different environments, and as a result are exposed to different experiences. But our shared experience is that we are all human,” Prince Harry said in a statement.
The show will be executive produced by Harpo Productions’ Terry Wood and Catherine Cyr, along with RadicalMedia’s Jon Kamen, Dave Sirulnick, and Alex Browne serving as showrunner.
It is directed and executive produced by Emmy Award and Spirit Award nominee Dawn Porter, and Academy Award and four-time BAFTA Award-winning Asif Kapadia. The series is produced by Jen Isaacson and Nell Constantinople.
During an interview with Winfrey in March, Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle revealed that she battled suicidal thoughts and expressed their disappointment with the British Royal family.
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Markle had told Winfrey that when she informed “the firm” or the Buckingham palace, about her condition, they refused to help her citing that she wasn’t “a paid employee at the firm”. Calling her time as a working royal “almost unsurvivable”, Markle said that she realised much later that she was not being protected.
This was during the time when the couple announced their separation from the Royal family.
“The majority of us carry some form of unresolved trauma, loss or grief, which feels – and is – very personal. Yet the last year has shown us that we are all in this together, and my hope is that this series will show there is power in vulnerability, connection in empathy, and strength in honesty,” Prince Harry added.
The couple recently collaborated with Netflix for a docu-series Heart of Invictus that will follow a group of athletes from around the globe, service members who have suffered life-changing injuries or illnesses on their road to the Invictus Games in The Hague 2020.