Matthew Lopez Knows the Stakes That ‘Red, White, & Royal Blue’ Had

The romantic comedy is back in the best way! A perfect example of that is Red, White, & Royal Blue. Based on the book by Casey McQuiston, their vision was brought to life with Matthew Lopez’s film on Prime Video. Starring Taylor Zakhar Perez as Alex Claremont-Diaz and Nicholas Galitzine as Prince Henry, the movie is a love story about two young men in power who have an enemies to lovers story that the stuff of fanfic is made of. Literally, people have both written fanfic about the novel as well as have theories as to whether or not it started as fanfiction.

Point being: It is something that we all cling to and talk about non-stop. The movie is now no different. Lopez brought McQuiston’s work to life in a way that made fans happy, those new to the store obsessed, and just genuinely made the world of Red, White, & Royal Blue that much brighter. I spoke with Lopez for the release of the film about his work with McQuiston as well as how it felt to bring this story in particular to life and the stakes that come along with it.

“I think it’s the same thing as to what makes this story unique is that the world that it set in not only makes it unlike anything I’ve ever seen before, it also gives it those stakes that you talked about,” Lopez said. “For Henry, and there are enormous mistakes. And then for Alex, with his mom running for reelection. So I think Casey really smartly just sort of found a way to take two worlds that audiences have traditionally been fascinated by and can’t get enough of on screen and put their two characters in the center of it. And so I inherited, as the director of this film, a world that was already pretty special and unique. And that was the great pleasure of making this movie.”

Bringing the political side to life

The casting of the President and the King of England is important to a movie like Red, White, & Royal Blue because we don’t spend as much time with them as we do with Henry and Alex but they are important to understanding how these two characters interact with both each other and their sexuality. For Alex, his mother (Uma Thurman) is open and understanding of her son. For Henry, the King (played by Stephen Fry) is not. So I asked Lopez about the casting of both Thurman and Fry and how they managed to bring those figures to life without over-shadowing the main love story.

“What Uma and Stephen’s presence in the film does, it’s vital because it does actually create a believable world that holds the story of Alex and Henry,” he said. “There’s a sense of real gravitas to the President and to the King. I think if we had worked with actors that were wonderful but the audience didn’t know, I don’t think that that weight would’ve existed for them. I think we needed to instantly recognize the President and we need to instantly recognize the King. I think their presence in the film is just an absolute beautiful act of support and the two actors who could be playing off first billed leads in a movie, that everyone would want to see, coming into this film and really wanting to help support the story of Alex and Henry, we were just very happy to have them.”

Bringing Henry and Alex to life

Often when you play beloved novel characters, you’re trying to stay as true to the novel as possible. What is great about Red, White, & Royal Blue comes from McQuiston’s freedom with their two main characters. Alex was my favorite in the movie and it comes down to how Zakhar Perez brought his oddities to life. Something that Lopez instantly recognized. “Taylor plays Alex like such a weirdo, you know? And Taylor is a bit of a weirdo, but not as much as Alex is,” he said. “We had a lot of fun. I was like, like, ‘oh, that’s weird. Do that.’ I had fun just sort of letting Taylor just play around and find offbeat things to do. And I was like, ‘well that, that was weird Taylor.’ And he goes, ‘yeah, it was, wasn’t it? Do you like it?’ I’m like, ‘yeah, I kind of do. And now do like a normal person.’ And he goes, ‘I don’t know how to do that.'”

On the flip side of Alex’s weird qualities is Henry and his awkwardness. “The big thing that we were looking at, if you go back and you look at Bringing Up Baby, I had Taylor and Nick watch that movie. And that movie is a sort of a precursor to Red, White, & Royal Blue in some ways that those two characters are Alex and Henry, but very different,” Lopez said. “It’s the inherent quality that both those actors possess. It really allowed me to sort of play while also allowing the film to be grounded. And I got to do both because of them.”

A world around Alex and Henry

For the most part, Red, White, & Royal Blue brings to life the love that Alex and Henry share together as the Prince of England and the first son of the United States. But without their friends and family, Alex and Henry’s story wouldn’t necessarily even happen. What the film does is condense their friendships into the film’s runtime but you still understand the importance of Alex’s friend Nora (Rachel Hilson). When I asked about finding the balance between the love story and those important friendships, Lopez pointed out how their involvement came down to how it serviced Alex and Henry’s love story.

“Every decision that I made in making this film was in service of helping the audience understand Alex and Henry and their journey through the story,” Lopez said. “Everything was about that. There were no two more important people to me than Alex and Henry and the other characters in the story really needed to support that. And where I got very lucky is I had crossed the board, I mean completely across the board, I had a cast filled with wonderful actors giving deeply specific performances. I feel watching the film that there is a deep inner life to all the characters. Even the characters who have less screen time than others. Because there’s a specificity to everyone. And you could actually look at the movie and pivot and look in each direction at each character. And you could tell a dozen other stories. For me, the specificity of the characterizations around them were so integral to making the whole movie feel alive and helping you understand Alex and Henry.”

And all of that led to making the more romantic moments between Henry and Alex pop. “The thing I was really adamant about from the beginning is that I did not want this movie to just to feel or look disposable. I wanted to make a film that was built to last,” he said. “I didn’t want to a film that you saw and then forgot about. I really wanted to make a movie that lasts in the audience’s imagination. The key to that was my director of photography, Stephen Goldblatt, who’s a legend in the business who was Mike Nichols’ director of photography on Angels in America and also Francis Coppola’s, DP on The Cotton Club. Stephen and I decided to invest in a movie that looked like a merchandise film. We really invested in making the movie look rich and sumptuous, which is different from what you would expect in a rom-com.”

He went on to talk about how rich the movie needed to look for him so that it had the staying power. “But I needed the film to look deep and rich so that we can understand the world that they inhabit. But then what we also allowed ourselves to do was just let the actors be loose and alive on camera and really also capture the broader comedy moments. So there was a danger that we could have sort of made something that sort of felt neither one way or the other and the challenge for us was to sort of integrate the two styles.”

And they do. They managed to bring Alex and Henry’s love to life in a way that has had us attached to them and I hope we continue to talk about them for years to come. You can watch Red, White, & Royal Blue on Prime Video now!

(featured image: Prime Video)