Prince Harry says he left royal life because UK press was 'destroying' his mental health

Prince Harry has said he stepped back from the royal family last year because the British press was "destroying" his mental health.

In a rare one-on-one interview in which he discussed the pressures of royal life and his move away from London, Harry told "The Late Late Show" host James Corden that he decided he needed to "get (his) family out of here" and that he preferred the depiction of royal life seen on Netflix show "The Crown" to the one published in newspapers.

"We all know what the British press can be like, and it was destroying my mental health," he said during the segment. "I was like, this is toxic. So I did what any husband and what any father would do."

The prince and his wife, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, quit as working members of the royal family in January 2020, a step that caused a crisis within the establishment.

They have since moved to Los Angeles and have begun carving out new lives, increasing their public visibility and engagement with more sympathetic media figures.

The release of Harry's interview with Corden comes days before he and Meghan sit down for a prime-time interview with Oprah Winfrey.

During the segment with Corden, in which the pair travel round Los Angeles in an open-top bus, Harry revealed he has watched "The Crown" -- the popular drama that probes a number of reported fractures within the royal family. "I'm way more comfortable with 'The Crown' than I am seeing the stories written about my family or my wife or myself," he said.

"They don't pretend to be news, it's fictional," Harry added of the show, about which his fellow royals have generally been tight-lipped. "But it's loosely based on the truth. Of course it's not strictly accurate, but ... it gives you a rough idea about what that lifestyle, what the pressures of putting duty and service above family and everything else, what can come from that."

Harry and Meghan have been mired in a long-running war of words and lawsuits with a large portion of the tabloid media, fighting multiple legal cases against publications and photo agencies that had printed details of their private lives.

Earlier this month, Meghan won a privacy claim against the publishers of the Mail on Sunday after they published a letter she sent her father, and launched a stinging rebuke to "dehumanizing" media organizations after the verdict, saying the "damage they have done and continue to do runs deep."