Their mental health awareness video starts with a gag—Sheeran “mistakenly” believing their team-up was to bring ginger awareness.
Prince Harry and musician Ed Sheeran teamed up to bring awareness to Mental Health Day, October 10, taking a moment to run a gag about their shared hair color. On a video shared to both of their Instagram accounts, Sheeran seems to have “mistaken” the purpose of their get-together.
“Really excited today,” Sheeran says in what looks like a behind-the-scenes interview. “I’m gonna go and, uh, film a thing with Prince Harry. (He) contacted me about doing a charity video with him, which is gonna be good. I’ve long admired him from afar.”
A Great Misunderstanding
Prince Harry pushes along the misunderstanding with ambiguous comments.
“This, for me, is a subject and a conversation that’s just not talked about enough,” said Prince Harry. “I mean, people all over the world are really suffering.”
The two then start to write a song, but soon their misunderstanding becomes evident.
“People just don’t understand what it’s like for people like us,” Sheeran says in the video. “The jokes and the snide comments, and I just feel like it’s time we stood up and said, ‘We’re not going to take this anymore. We’re ginger, and we’re going to fight.’”
Prince Harry then tries to set the record straight.
World Mental Health Day
“Um, OK,” he says to Sheeran. “Slightly awkward. This might have been maybe a miscommunication, but this is about World Mental Health Day.”
Sheeran tries to play it off.
“Oh, yeah, yeah. Of course. No, no. I definitely knew that,” he says, deleting the phrase “GINGERS UNITE” from the document draft on his laptop.
The pair get back on message after the gag, encouraging everyone to be aware of those around them who might be struggling with mental health issues.
“Guys, this World Mental Health Day, reach out, make sure that your friends, strangers, look out for anybody that might be suffering in silence,” Prince Harry tells viewers with Sheeran sitting by his side. “We’re all in this together.”
Prince Harry has been an advocate for mental health, struggling himself as he grappled with the sudden death of his mother, Princess Diana, as a child.
“My way of dealing with it was sticking my head in the sand, refusing to ever think about my mum, because why would that help?” he told The Telegraph in a 2017 interview. “It’s only going to make you sad; it’s not going to bring her back. So, from an emotional side, I was like ‘Right, don’t ever let your emotions be part of anything.’ So, I was a typical sort of 20, 25, 28-year-old running around going ‘Life is great’, or ‘Life is fine’ and that was exactly it.”
Recently, Prince Harry has set his sights on the popular video game Fortnite, which he blasts as addictive and irresponsible.
