To help spread her message of female-led ingenuity at the local level, Nahmias enlisted former Girl Scout Meghan Markle who, like Olive, was the daughter of her troop leader back when she sold cookies. Markle serves as executive producer on Cookie Queens alongside her husband, Prince Harry, and Chanel Pysnik, head of unscripted content at the Sussexes’ Archewell Productions. “What’s awesome is having all of our executive producers, including the duke and duchess, wanting to shine a light on young people and take them seriously,” says Nahmias. “We don’t often see girls represented three-dimensionally, where we can be ambitious and cutthroat—[but] also tender and vulnerable. Meghan got that from the beginning.”
A source close to Meghan tells Vanity Fair that she was “moved by Nahmias’s vision for the project.” “Meghan was a Brownie and a Junior when she was younger, so there was also a personal connection. She speaks fondly of her time as a Girl Scout and the lessons it taught her about entrepreneurship and confidence,” they added.
Earlier this year, Markle and Prince Harry made their first joint appearance at the Sundance Film Festival to introduce the film and meet a few of the featured Girl Scouts.
“I’m kind of in awe of her,” Olive, now 14, tells VF. “[The Sussexes] have a documentary on Netflix that me and my parents watched before any of this happened. So it was amazing that we watched their documentary, and she watched ours! It was such a surreal, full-circle moment.”
That was also true for 12-year-old Nikki, a Chino, California, native who hails from the same Girl Scout council in greater Los Angeles that Markle was a part of back in the day. “I gave her a really big hug,” Nikki, who was nine years old at the time of filming, confirms. In the doc, she aims to follow in the footsteps of her two older sisters to be named the “cookie queen,” a colloquial term for the top seller in the area.
Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex, Olive, Ara, Alysa Nahmias, Celia, Shannon Elizabeth, Nyah, Nala and Nikki at a special screening of Cookie Queens on July 28, 2026 in Los Angeles, California.Eric Charbonneau/Getty Images
