Entertainment

The 'Suits' Creator Just Addressed Whether Megan Markle Will Return For The Final Season

by Brad Witter
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Could Rachel Zane come back to Suits and tie up loose ends? Many have wondered if Meghan Markle will return for Suits' final season, and the USA legal drama's creator Aaron Korsh isn't totally dismissing the possibility of the Duchess of Sussex reprising her role. Sure, it seems unlikely, but with Suits ending after its upcoming Season 9's ten-episode order, Markle's return would be the ultimate royal sendoff to the series she starred in for seven seasons between 2011 and 2018.

"As of this minute I don’t know which of our old original cast will be back and which won’t because we’re so early in the season," Korsh revealed to Deadline in response to the website's question about whether Markle, specifically, will return to Suits.

When the expectant royal's character Rachel last appeared on the series just before her royal wedding to Prince Harry, she had just married Mike (played by actor Patrick J. Adams), with the newlyweds moving to Seattle for work. Since then, Markle, of course, became a real-life member of the British royal family, and UK tabloids have reported on rumors that NBC Universal was wrangling a deal in which they would donate millions of dollars to charitable causes in exchange for the duchess agreeing to appear in one episode.

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Korsh laughed off the notion. "I can tell you that those things in the papers, I have no idea what they’re talking about," he added in his Deadline interview. "I have not arranged for millions of dollars to be donated to anything on behalf of anyone so that I can tell you, but as far as the original people coming back including [Gina Torres], we’re so early in the season that we haven’t formulated what we want to do, so we can’t reach out to people before we know what we want to do."

Ending the series may have had a bit to do with an "unforeseen circumstance," as the creator called it: "You can never know that one of your stars is going to marry the Prince of England, and Patrick decided not to return, so we had a choice whether to keep going after season 7. We decided that the original plan was a 16-episode season 8 and a 10-episode season 9, let’s see if we can do that. And dovetailing with that, Katherine Heigl called and she wanted to be involved in the show, and we thought it was a perfect way to help extend the franchise and make it to that end of season 9." (Heigl joined Suits as lawyer Samantha Wheeler last summer.)

On the pro side: Even after leaving the show, Markle stayed close with her costars, with Adams, Torres, as well as Sarah Rafferty and Gabriel Macht, all attended her wedding. If she returns to the show, they may have to bring her up to speed, however, as People reported last year that Markle hasn't been watching Suits since leaving the show.

As for how Suits will wrap up, Korsh says not to necessarily expect a princess-worthy happily ever after: We have over the course of the years a lot of characters that we care about and love. And yet rarely if ever have we done a full-on happy ending for all of them or a full-on sad ending for all of them, it’s just not common to do in the lexicon of Suits. Oftentimes we give with one hand, take away with another or have a bittersweet ending. That’s just often how it goes."

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Regardless of how the series ends, Markle's comeback would totally rule for fans.