SPOILER alert: This story discusses several major plot developments in the feature film “Red, White & Royal Blue,” currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video, as well as the novel it’s based on.
Over this past weekend, certain corners of the internet were hyperventilating with excitement over the release of “Red, White & Royal Blue,” the romantic comedy about how Alex Claremont-Diaz (Taylor Zakhar Perez), the First Son of the United States, and Prince Henry (Nicholas Galitzine), third in line to the British throne, transform from enemies to friends to lovers. As the film shot to the top of Prime Video’s Top 10 movie list, fans flooded TikTok, Twitter and Instagram with memes and reactions to the production and how it measures up to its source material, the best-selling 2019 novel by Casey McQuiston.
For director Matthew López —the Tony award-winning playwright (for “The Inheritance”), who also adapted McQuiston’s novel with Ted Malawer —the enthusiastic reception for his feature filmmaking debut has been enormously gratifying. At least, what he’s seen of it.
“I’ve been dipping a toe in,” he says via Zoom from his home in London. “I have some friends who have been sending me memes.”
He smiles, a bit sheepishly. “The sad little secret about my life is that I’m the most sensitive person in the world,” he says. “If one person in Iowa doesn’t like the curtains in one scene, I’ve failed. I feel everything very personally. I don’t have a very hard candy coating.”
Despite that, López gamely talked with PvNew about how he approached making the film, including why he cut out major characters and storylines from McQuiston’s novel, how he worked with Uma Thurman on her portrayal of the President of the United States, and just how involved he got in designing the movie’s central sex scene.
Finding Uma Thurman’s accent
“Red, White & Royal Blue” was already a few weeks into production in the U.K. when Thurman reached out to Lopéz so the director could hear her perform as Alex’s mother, President Ellen Claremont, for the first time. McQuiston envisioned Claremont as a fiery Democrat from Texas, so Thurman worked with dialect coach Tim Monich on a buttery Texas drawl that has become one of the standout features of the film.
“And I was like, ‘Uma, it sounds great,’” López says of their first Zoom conference. “And she says, ‘Are you sure?’ And I’m like, ‘I think so.’ But I was also very distracted. Then she gets on set and I finally listen to her. I’m like, Okay, we’re good, we’re good. We’re very, very good.”
In McQuiston’s novel, Claremont reads as an alternate reality version of Hillary Clinton, but López strove to differentiate the character from current female politicians. “So many women in politics are asked, it seems, to sacrifice whatever their idea of femininity is in favor of an exchange for power,” he says. “It was so important to me that this was a woman who could hold both things —that she could be a powerful woman who also presented her own femininity in the world without apologies.”
Reshaping Alex’s bisexual journey
In both the novel and the film, Prince Henry first kisses Alex on New Year’s Eve, but Alex’s reaction changed significantly in López’s adaptation. In the book, the kiss sends Alex into a profound realization of his bisexuality, something he’d never given himself time to consider amid his feverish devotion to his mother’s presidential campaign and his undergraduate studies at Georgetown University.
In the film, however, Alex is older — he appears to be in law school — and takes Henry’s kiss in stride, in so far as his attraction to men is concerned.
“It was born of my decision to cast actors who are older than the characters were in the book,” says López. “I really wanted there to be some genuine stakes and gravity for these characters. If they were too young, you could just explain this away as puppy love. I wanted this movie to be about that first real romance of your life, the first real love affair, the first real love.”
Rather than tell a story about a kid in his early 20s who is plunged into uncertainty about his sexuality, López says he wanted Alex to be someone who had messed around with guys but “has yet to have a reason to really understand himself as bisexual.”
The director continues, “I wanted Alex’s angst to not be about his sexuality. I wanted it to be focused on Henry.”
Cutting out Alex’s mentor and sister
López’s desire for Alex’s emotional energy to be focused exclusively on Henry was part of a wider philosophy he had about fitting McQuiston’s novel into a feature film shape. “Anything that isn’t about Alex and Henry and their relationship and their own personal journeys to the narrative doesn’t belong in the film,” he says. “I was very strict about that.”
That meant that López had to cut several major storylines from the film, first among them, Alex’s mentor, Rafael Luna, a gay senator from Colorado. In the novel, Alex is seemingly betrayed by Luna when he joins the campaign of President Claremont’s Republican opponent, and appears to be instrumental in leaking the details of Alex and Henry’s relationship to the media. In the film, that plot function is performed by Miguel Ramos (Juan Castano), a jealous gay political journalist (the worst kind!) who had a brief fling with Alex during his mother’s first presidential campaign.
“Honestly, it had to do with runtime,” López says. “I knew I had at most 120 minutes —I took 118 — to tell the story. I wanted to take away as little screen time from the romance as possible, which means I had to deliver the peril and the stakes efficiently.”
While he found the political intrigue of Luna’s machinations to be gripping as a reader, “As an adapter, I looked at it and said, that’s, like, 10 minutes there.”
Similarly, López faced a dilemma about what to do with Alex’s core confidantes in the novel: His sister, June, and his best friend, Nora, the vice president’s granddaughter.
“I really didn’t relish the idea of getting on set with two young actresses who are each being given half a meal,” López says. “There’s nothing more unhappy than an actor who doesn’t feel like they’re being well fed by the material, and rightly so.”
Ultimately, López decided to cut June from the film completely and give all her scenes to Nora (Rachel Hilson). “As a result, I think Rachel has a really great ride throughout the movie,” he says. “She’s a real presence in the film. That wouldn’t have happened if half of her scenes had gone to someone else, and then you would have had two young women in the movie with nothing to do.”
López knows his decision, which he ran by McQuiston, was “controversial” among the book’s fans. “I keep myself away from too much chatter, but I don’t live in a cave,” he says. But he stands by his conviction that the movie ultimately had to serve its central love story. “There are some scenes between Alex and Henry alone that run six, seven minutes. That can’t happen if I’m having to explain June scenes and Luna scenes.”
Replacing the Queen and excising Henry’s mother
Another major character, Henry’s mother, Princess Catherine, was also cut from the film, but for a slightly different reason. In the novel, she’s absent from Henry’s life, still in mourning over the death of his father — but during Henry’s final confrontation with the Queen of England over his relationship with Alex, Catherine sweeps in to stand up for her son and defend his right to come out as gay.
In the film, Henry’s mother is a no-show.
“It was honestly just a storytelling difference that I had with Casey in what I needed from the movie,” López says. An early draft of the screenplay did include Catherine. But, he says, “It robbed Henry of the the agency to speak for himself. We get to the end and someone who you’ve never met before comes in and saves the day.”
López is quick to add that he has no issue with McQuiston’s novel. “Obviously, I’m the president of the Casey McQuiston fan club,” he says. “But in my movie, looking at it, I was like, Henry needs to save the day. He needs to stand up for himself. He needs to be the agent of change. He can’t be rescued by his mother.”
López also decided change the Queen of England to the King in the film — but he made that decision months before the passing of Queen Elizabeth II. (Stephen Fry shot his scene as the King in July 2022, two months before the Queen’s death.)
Instead, López’s decision was driven by how saturated pop culture had become with Oscar and Emmy-winning depictions of Queen Elizabeth.
“There we were at the time, with a monarch who had been ruling for 70 years played with distinction by Helen Mirren, by Olivia Colman, by Claire Foy, by Imelda Staunton,” he says with a chuckle. “I was like, I’m just dead meat. Who am I going to get? They’ve all played her, and it’s not even her!”
Lopez also understood that the current line of succession in England is a string of men. “Most of the world will know a King of England, not a Queen of England for most of their lives,” he says. “So I figured might as well let the film accept that inevitability.”
Designing the sex scenes
In McQuiston’s novel, Alex and Henry have sex many, many times, described by the author with intricately detailed — and delightfully spicy — prose. While the First Son and the Prince do make out often in the film, they only have full-on gay sex on screen once, in a hotel room in Paris.
“Casey conjures that spice through the use of their words,” López says. “I had to keep it moving. As good looking as those two young men are, even the most lascivious audience member would eventually get tired of seeing them make love on screen. If we weren’t learning about the characters, then it didn’t belong in the movie.”
At the same time, López— who grew up as a gay kid in the ’80s and ’90s starved for queer representation — was determined to make the scene as authentic as possible.
“We need to make sure that it is unambiguous to anyone watching this scene what precisely is happening,” he says. “We’re going to be accurate to the body positioning, to the breath, to the moment of insertion.”
Working with intimacy coordinator Robbie Taylor Hunt, López thought through every possible detail about how two men have sex — and what about that process needed to make it into the scene: “We talked about, ‘Does the prince douche before they go in? Do we need to tell the audience that? Does the audience just assume that that’s going on?’”
A great deal of time was spent on whether Prince Henry would be on PrEP, a medication taken to prevent HIV infection during sex. “Robbie and I decided together that the prince is probably not on PrEP, because it would be too dangerous for him to ask for prescription,” López says. “So the prince absolutely uses condoms. And because we couldn’t really effectively answer the PrEP question narratively, we wanted to also just tell the story that the prince engages in safe sex practices and takes his sexual health seriously.”
Eagle-eyed viewers have indeed caught sight of condom wrappers near Henry and Alex’s bed during a couple of points in the film — alongside a bottle of lube.
“once we had passed a certain part in the story, I was like, OK, let’s empty out some of the lube,’” López says. “Robbie and I were looking at it, like, ‘How much would they use? Like, well, let’s take it down about this much. OK, that makes sense to me.’”
It was also vitally important to López to block out every beat of the sex scene in Paris. “Days before we shot that scene, Robbie and I actually got into the bed together,” the director says through laughter. “There are videos that could, like, ruin both our careers. Because we were like, ‘Alright, we’re having sex. What are we going to do? Okay, this pillow goes here. The condom’s going to land here. I’m going to do this.’ We probably overdid it in terms of the preparation for the scene. But we also wanted to make sure that we got on to set and we had an answer for every conceivable question.”
The opportunity to show two men having sex in what amounts to a major studio romantic comedy was not lost on López. “I’d be a liar if I told you there wasn’t strategy to the scene, that I didn’t want to cause a conversation about why they’ve never seen this scene in a studio film,” he says. But he was also keenly aware of what he was asking of his actors.
“Look, I don’t know if I could do it,” he says. “I’m fully aware that I’m asking two actors to do something that I’m probably not willing to do. I better make sure that I’m not wasting their time, that I’m not making them feel exploited, and that they are included in every single decision, every step of the way. It’s the only responsible way to do it. We knew that if Taylor and Nick didn’t feel safe, we would never have gotten that scene out of them.”
