Sussex Social Circle Keeps Shrinking and the Couple Can't Figure Out Why

A-list doors are quietly closing on Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, and sources close to the pair say the Sussexes genuinely cannot see themselves as the common denominator.

Meghan Markle and Prince Harry have seen their Hollywood social circle shrink significantly, according to a Page Six report published May 16, 2026.
A Sussex insider told the outlet that the couple fails to recognize their own role in the fallouts, saying they never think it is them.
The Sussexes relocated to Montecito, California, after stepping back from royal duties in 2020, initially with a wide network of celebrity supporters.
Several high-profile friendships that flourished during the couple's early California years have since cooled or collapsed entirely.
The report adds to a pattern of coverage suggesting the pair's influence in Hollywood has contracted sharply since the peak of their post-royal pivot.

Montecito has a way of looking like a fresh start. The eucalyptus-lined streets, the farmers'-market regulars, the neighbours famous enough to have a Wikipedia disambiguation page — it sells the idea that reinvention is just a zip code away. For Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, the move in 2020 arrived with exactly that kind of promise, and for a while the A-list address book seemed to back it up.

Six years on, the returns look thinner. A report published by Page Six on May 16, 2026 describes a Hollywood social circle that has contracted steadily, with onetime supporters drifting away and invitations drying up. The detail that landed hardest came from a source described as a Sussex insider. “They don’t get it,” the source told the outlet. “They never think it is them.”

That quote is doing a lot of work. The Sussex camp has, over the past few years, attributed various public setbacks to press hostility, royal-family dynamics, and broader institutional resistance. The insider framing here points somewhere closer to home — personality, conduct, or simply the social mathematics of a couple whose controversy-to-celebrity ratio has shifted since the Netflix docuseries and Harry’s memoir “Spare” landed in late 2022.

Hollywood friendships are famously transactional and rarely weather sustained controversy without a clear upside for both parties. The Sussexes built early goodwill on novelty and a compelling exit narrative. Whether that currency has simply depreciated, or whether specific falling-outs accelerated the retreat, the Page Six report does not specify. What it does suggest is that the couple’s read on their own situation remains, by at least one account, considerably rosier than the guest lists reflect.