A lasting friendship! Prince Harry and Nicholas “Nicky” Scott have been close pals since their early teenage years.
“We were actually the rooms next door to each other so we could lean out of the window and talk after lights out,” Scott said in the first episode of Harry & Meghan, which premiered on Thursday, December 8, noting the twosome met when they were both enrolled at boarding school Eton College at the age of 13. “But, I think as a young kid you don’t necessarily have the language to have that complicated mental health chat, beyond ‘how are you?’ [and] ‘fine.’”
Shortly after the pair started school together, news broke that Harry’s mother Princess Diana had died in a fatal car accident in Paris. Scott remembered that his mother informed him of the tragic news but that his pal wasn’t interested in opening up about his bereavement.
“If anything, [we] probably veered away from having that discussion [about Diana’s 1997 death],” the Scotland native recalled in the Netflix program, in which he referred to it as an “emotional hot potato” to discuss. “And then, I think like us all, we watched that funeral — and watched him walking behind the coffin. That’s when you first really got to know him or saw an insight beyond a snap or a picture and felt that you knew him better than you did.”
While the Duke of Sussex, now 38, was not keen to share his grief, the two friends were more open about their respective love lives.
“I remember when we discussed this, [I told him], ‘Wouldn’t it be great if somebody already had their identity, some success and had carved out their role in the world?’ ” Scott recalled in the “[They are] just so evidently really in love,” Scott noted in the second episode of Harry & Meghan, gushing that the Spare author and the Duchess of Sussex, 41, are “just so evidently really in love.”
Harry and the former Hallmark actress opened up about their respective childhoods and early courtship in Harry & Meghan, which was directed by Liz Garbus. The couple — who wed in May 2018 — began dating in July 2016. News broke about their romance that October.
“I mean, I could just feel everything in her body vibrating,” Abigail Spencer gushed in the first episode of the doc, recalling the moment her former Suits costar Meghan informed her that she was in love with Harry. “I was screaming because I could tell it was different. It was very clear that they were going to go to the ends of the earth to be together.”
The Archewell cofounders — who share son Archie, 3, and daughter Lilibet, 18 months — got engaged in November 2017, nearly one year before their royal wedding.
Scroll below to meet Harry’s childhood friend: