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On Suits, Meghan Markle’s paralegal-turned-attorney is her best-known role, but there was a chance that wouldn’t have been the case. A few years before the legal series aired, Markle seemed to have a steady role on Fringe. That is, until the Duchess of Sussex vanished as quickly as her character was introduced. The Season 2 premiere introduced a new threat to the Fringe Division team, which left FBI agent Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv) into critical situations. This gave room for the introduction to Markle, who is thrown into the action and rose to the heroic level of the main leads. While Markle’s time with Fringe Division didn’t last long, the sci-fi series found a way to continue what her character set up.
Before Playing a Lawyer, Meghan Markle Was in the FBI
In “A New Day in the Old Town,” junior FBI agent Amy Jessup (Markle) seemed to be a major new player in the works. In many ways, she was an audience surrogate to catch everyone up to speed on the bizarre events Fringe Division investigated over the first season. She’s the first at the scene of a strange car crash. One of the damaged vehicles belonged to Olivia, who is not inside, while the doors are locked, the seat belt is buckled, and the airbags have been deployed. Jessup found Peter Bishop (Joshua Jackson) to be unhelpful when he arrived, who wanted his questions answered, not the other way around. “It’s not that I don’t appreciate petulance, Mr. Bishop,” she replied. Peter is aggravated, much like TV fans who also want answers on where the hell Olivia is. It’s a strong way to introduce this new agent who doesn’t back down. Suddenly, Olivia is shot out of the windshield as if the immobile car were in motion. Welcome to the strange world of Fringe, Agent Jessup.
She joined the team, tracking down the other driver who ended up being a shapeshifter assigned to target Olivia. But the Fringe Division is one step behind, the shapeshifter has already made it to the hospital and taken over the body of a nurse (Simone Kessell). Torv got to play Olivia as more visibly shaken than she ever has been. Markle is the one to stop the shapeshifter from their second attack. In a role that is simply credited as “Nurse,” Kessell doesn’t waste any minute she was on camera as the shapeshifter. Her eyes get watered up as her whole body is filled with desperation to see the assassination through to the end.
In this premiere episode, religious beliefs are an important character trait to Jessup. In her free time, she compared several past Fringe cases to Biblical passages, putting down ominous notes like “Eat the Flesh,” a condensed version of the 19:18 passage from the Book of Revelation. She returned in the next episode for a short appearance where inside a suspect’s house, Jessup opened a small cabinet to find a Holy Bible inside. Whatever could have happened with this storyline, never did occur. Agent Amy Jessup disappeared from here on out, plucked out of the show as mysterious as a case the Fringe Division got a call on. It wouldn’t be too long after her departure from Season 2, Markle went to do her most famous role.
‘Suits’ Let The Duchess of Sussex Be a TV Star
In Suits, Rachel Zane started out as a paralegal for Pearson Hardman, who grew over the following seasons, in a legal career and a romantic relationship with Mike (Patrick J. Adams). Markle swapped out one show with a lead character who has photographic memory for another. Mike could file information internally upon learning it the first time, while Olivia is known to recall numbers from her past or from current cases. While the USA legal series didn’t play a big part in Markle’s short stay on Fringe, it did free her up to join the cast. Season 2 of Fringe was in 2009, whereas Suit’s first season wasn’t until 2010 when it went by the title, A Legal Mind. Agent Jessup’s sudden absence didn’t go unnoticed in 2009 either.
Originally, it was to be a recurring part, which ended up not happening. Fringe producer Jeff Pinker told Entertainment Weekly Markle’s character didn’t have any specific “length of time” to her next appearance. He added, “[But] we’re really trying to tell stories about our main characters… we want to get deeper with them, so we don’t have a lot of time to go into the FBI. I think our fans really want to get to know our [core] characters more and that’s what we’re endeavoring to do this year.” Although it might be odd the religious direction Jessup would have added, the sci-fi series did follow up in other ways.
When Science and Faith Clashed on ‘Fringe’
“Unearthed” is an unaired episode of Season 1, released awkwardly during Season 2, that involved resurrection and a possession. A teen girl is taken off life support, but awakens, screaming out the launch codes to a nuclear submarine. Then she speaks Russian, without having known the language prior. But you know who speaks Russian, a Navy officer who is found murdered. To keep it less supernatural, the Fringe team figure out the officer was exposed to heavy radiation prior to his death. That somehow let his consciousness take over the girl. In Season 3, there was another possession episode using the concept of soul magnets. These microscopic devices can attract the consciousness of someone after death. Walter set out to make this work, hoping it would bring his old lab partner back, played by none other than sci-fi icon Leonard Nimoy. What followed saw Nimoy’s character take over Olivia’s body for a few episodes, having Anna Torv do an impression of the actor’s gravelly voice. It’s one of the weirder storylines for sure– even weirder in how it kind of worked, the success owning plenty to Torv’s talents.
How could soul magnets be possible? Walter explained it that, “A person’s consciousness. Their soul is energy. And energy cannot be created or destroyed.” It blurred the line of the supernatural, and to the show’s credit it understood what it was doing too. After hearing Walter, a character stated out of bafflement, “Life force? Uh, you mean like a soul? Is that even a scientific concept?” Later in Season 3, Peter is gravely injured. Unable to help his son, Walter visited the hospital’s prayer room, leading to a small, quiet character moment which actor John Noble gives a stellar performance for. Walter sits down in a pew, hands folded, his face breaking into a sob, as he sought help he knew he could not give to Peter. Season 3 ends on storyline that included a terrorist group called the End of Dayers, who wanted to do deliver nothing but destruction around them. Like Kessell did in her small role back in Season 2, Brad Dourif is one of the main terrorist leaders, playing the role with remorse and determination for the next attack. The End of Dayers aren’t a direct reference to what Jessup wrote down, but it indirectly returned to what she was researching, her notes and this group’s name belonging to the Book of Revelation.
Markle talked to Variety about anxieties related to her acting career around the time Fringe and Suits happened:
“For me, I had tried for so long to land on a show, filming all these pilots, wondering if they would get picked up. All of Season 1 on Suits, I was convinced I was going to get recast. All the time. It got to a point where the creator was like, ‘Why are you so worried about this?’”
The role on Suits worked out much better that’s for sure. A recurring character like Agent Jessup might have added too many religious elements to the sci-fi series, where the faith-centric episodes did creep close to jumping the shark. Without a doubt, it would have challenged the way the show explored the boundaries between faith and science. Amy Jessup might have disappeared, but the possessions, soul magnets, and End of Dayers did their part to fill in for the lost Fringe agent.
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