Red, White & Royal Blue on Prime Video is the hotly-anticipated screen adaptation of Casey McQuiston's bestselling LGBTQ+ romance, in which Alex Claremont-Diaz (The Kissing Booth 2 and 3 star Taylor Zakhar Perez), the son of the President of the United States, embarks on a clandestine relationship with Britain's Prince Henry (Cinderella's Nicholas Galitzine).
The relationship is uncharted territory for both of them, and as their secret affair blows up into a public scandal, the couple must decide if they are willing to risk everything to be together.
Bringing the story to the screen was the responsibility of award-winning playwright Matthew López (The Inheritance), who directed and co-wrote the film, and we caught up with Matthew to find out why this project means so much to him...
Red, White & Royal Blue: Matthew López interview
You were a big fan of the book — was this a passion project for you?
"It absolutely was. I read the book, and rare is the moment in your life or career when you have so much certainty that something zooms straight to the top of your must-do list, like ‘would drop things for this’ passion, so it really caused me to sort of pursue the project incredibly aggressively. I just thought the idea of anybody else but me making this movie would have just thrown me into fits of jealousy, so I didn’t want that! [laughs]"
Were you already viewing it as a movie in your head when you first read it?
"I’ve always done that since I was a child, it’s hard for me not to read a book and imagine the movie in some ways, but I also think that’s part of the joy of reading a book — whenever you read a book you have more power than the author in some ways. At that moment, you’re the casting director, you’re the production designer, the costume designer!"
"I allowed myself to finish it for the first time just for pure pleasure, but by the time I got to page 50 I knew I wanted to make this movie. Once I knew that, I went back and I re-read it a little more critically, just to make sure that I was not jumping in without checking the depth of the water, so to speak. And I was like ‘yep, I wanna do this, let’s go!’ So I read it twice within, like, a five day period."
A huge part of the success of this film rests on finding the right chemistry between your two leads. How hard was it to find the right actors to play Alex and Henry, and what was it about Taylor and Nick that made them right for their roles?
"We knew that we would not have a movie until we had our — I was about to say “until we had our Taylor and Nick”! — until we had our Alex and Henry. In all honesty, I don’t know if we would have ended up making the movie if we felt like we were compromising on the casting, because you get that wrong and you just don’t have a film. So it took months of searching, particularly for Alex, because I wasn’t at all certain who was going to be out there for this role, and as a Puerto Rican filmmaker I was acutely aware of the opportunity to cast this role in a way that was gonna sort of bring a new name and a new face to the public. To my delight there were a lot of young Latin men out there who auditioned for the role and it was so exciting to go through all their tapes. [The leads] both emerged singularly, and then the big trick was to see if they would work together as a couple."
"I knew that both Taylor and Nick were perfectly cast as their roles, but what I wasn’t sure of until I put them in a chemistry read was ‘would they play well together?’ The nightmare scenario for me was finding two perfect actors for the role who did not gel at all together — so the degree to which this could have gone wrong for me, with the casting, was just stratospheric, and the fact that it went so well in terms of finding the right people for the roles who were also just the right people for each other was a lucky break that came at the end of a very long process! [laughs]"
The chemistry between them is definitely spot-on...
"And I didn’t have to teach them that! They possessed that from the beginning. I mean, we worked hard on their performances together but what was innate from the moment they first met was they got each other, and they got along so well together, and they played so incredibly well together."
You've got a great ensemble cast around them too, including Uma Thurman, Stephen Fry and Sharon D Clarke to name just three. What was it like assembling that ensemble?
"Oh, it was delightful — I felt like a kid in a candy store! I think there’s a point at which, once a project starts to actually get some forward momentum, then it starts to become a lot easier to convince people to be in the movie, and by the time we got Uma, I was like ‘great, who else wants to join the fun wagon?!’ Stephen took no convincing whatsoever, that was such a happy thing for me, because I thought ‘well, there’s a very slim chance he’s going to say yes to this’, you know, I’m sure he’s busy, I’m sure he’s not going to want to do it, it’s too perfect, and then he said yes straight away, and I felt so happy."
"And then Sharon, I honestly was just like — when I knew I get to cast a fictional UK prime minister, I was like ‘well, let’s go for the most hopeful version of what we’d love to see in a prime minister’, and when they asked me to think about it, I was like ‘oh! Sharon D Clarke — ask her if she’d come in and do a day for us’. It’s the same thing with Sharon as with Uma, the first thing I said for each of the President and the Prime Minister was ‘would you vote for that actor to actually do that job?’ I can’t vote in the UK, but if I could, I would vote for Sharon!"
One of the most iconic scenes in the book is Alex and Henry's fight at the royal wedding where the cake falls on them. How tricky was that to film — did you have multiple cakes for multiple shots?
"We hedged our bets a bit! For the most part it was a styrofoam cake, it was a squishy polystyrene I think, which had a latex coating on it. It was so lightweight that actually my production designer lay down on the floor and had her team drop it on her head just to show us that it was safe! For a lot of what you see in the movie we got away with using a very durable, indestructible cake, and a lot of the aftermath of the cake disaster was also not real cake, because one of the things that was really important to us was to make sure that we didn’t waste food needlessly, so most of the cake in that whole thing is not real cake. The real cake was saved for when we had to just like throw it in their faces, and we did it once. The shot of the cake landing in their faces, we got once, we got lucky, it landed perfectly where we wanted it to be. It was actually me and my production designer throwing cake in Taylor and Nick’s faces, which was very cathartic for me after a few weeks of filming!"
The book has such a huge and devoted fanbase. Did that add any pressure on you when it came to making this adaptation?
"I knew that there were a lot of expectations of this adaptation, I knew that people really feel very personally about the book. I think there’s something really wonderful that happens, this transference when you fall in love with a book and it’s yours, ignoring the fact that billions of other people also feel the same way about it, so I knew that it would be a bad idea to screw it up! [laughs] That was always at the forefront of my mind. The thing that is also true is that I am one of those crazy obsessive fans over the book, and for me it was like, the ultimate in fanfiction that I got to make. But I recognise that I was very fortunate and lucky to be the person to make this movie, because I think there are a lot of people who are counting on me not to screw up — and I took that very seriously!"
Alex and Henry both live in a privileged world — what do you think makes their story so relatable?
"I mean, it’s a fairytale, right? It’s just an absolute fairytale, there’s something aspirational about it, and when I read the books, it just felt like a wonderful bit of escapism. I think the reason people love these characters so much, in the book, and hopefully when they see Taylor and Nick in the film, is that these two people can only exist together in fiction, right? The rarefied world that they live in, that these two rarefied worlds would collide like this, can only happen in fiction — that’s what makes it so delicious. For me, there’s something so beautifully ludicrous about how sort of unattainable their lives are, and it allows us actually to go full circle with them and deeply humanise them in some ways. That’s the other thing too, they live these extraordinary privileged and sort of high-flung lives, but what I’ve always loved about the book and what was really important to us in creating the movie was that there are two beating hearts at the centre of this book. At the end of the day, you actually end up forgetting that they’re two princes, basically, and you really do, in the novel, and I hope in the film, just fall in love with these two people."
- Red, White & Royal Blue launches globally on Prime Video on Friday August 11
