Meghan Markle's father Thomas Markle thinks she looks "terrified" while on outings with husband Prince Harry and her new royal family and is pleading to be able to speak and reconcile with his daughter after being "shunned."
The 73-year-old made his comments to The Sun in what marks his second on-camera interview since the Duke and Duchess of Sussex's May wedding, which he had missed due to heart surgery and watched on TV in Mexico, where he lives.
"My thing about my daughter right now is that I think she is terrified," Thomas told the newspaper in comments posted on Sunday. "I see it in her eyes, I see it in her face and I see it in her smile. I've seen her smile for years. I know her smile. I don't like the one I'm seeing now. This one isn't even a stage smile—this is a pained smile."
"That might be just having a couple of bad days. I don't know. It really worries me. I think she's under too much pressure," he said. "There's a high price to pay to be married to that family."
Thomas also called Meghan's royal style "something out of an old movie." Like her sister-in-law Kate Middleton, Duchess of Cambridge, his daughter typically steps out wearing modest, high-end fashions.
"Why in 2018 are we dressing like the 1930s?" he said. "Why do they have to cover their knees?"
In the weeks leading up to the wedding, Thomas came under public criticism after he was photographed by paparazzi in the Mexican beach city of Rosarito, where he lives, for staged photos. He later apologized for staging them, telling ITV's Good Morning Britain last month in his first broadcast interview since the royal wedding, "I thought that would be a nice way of improving my look. Well obviously that all went to hell."
Thomas told The Sun he thinks he is "being shunned" by Megan and her new in-laws because he "made a profit on the staged pictures." He said he has apologized to the royal family over them.
"Anyone who makes a profit off the royal family becomes shunned," he said. "The royal family is living by rules that are outdated. Half of Great Britain seems to make a fortune selling pictures of my daughter and her husband. Are they shunned?"
Thomas told The Sun he last spoke to Meghan and Harry, briefly, after the wedding and has been unable to reach her since then. Kensington Palace has not commented on his remarks.
"Since the interview, the phone number that I call doesn't work anymore," he told The Sun in on-camera remarks. "The, I guess, liaison with the royal family never answers back, and there's no address I can write to so I have no way of contacting my daughter."
Thomas said this marks the longtime time he has gone without speaking to Meghan.
"My message [to her] would be, 'I love you, I miss you, I'm sorry for anything that went wrong,'" he said. "And I want to be her [future] child's grandfather and I want to be near them. I want to be a part of their life. I'd like to put our differences behind us and get together. I miss you very much."
"I don't care whether she's pissed off at me—I want to see her," he told The Sun. "I just want to have a father-daughter relationship. I took care of my mother the last five years of her life. My daughter said to me she would take care of me in my declining years. I'm not talking about money—I'm talking about taking care of me. That's important to me."
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