The Sex and Secrets of ‘Red, White & Royal Blue’

A lot of people have opinions about the son of the President of the United States falling in love with the Prince of England.

Red, White & Royal Blue, the new rom-com based on Casey McQuiston’s bestselling novel, was the No. 1 movie on Prime Video worldwide over its first weekend of release, the streamer announced in a tweet. (Take that opaque bragging from the company’s own account for whatever you think it’s worth.) It also dominated conversation on social media throughout the weekend; its trending topic surged; and it spawned myriad memes. That popularity is still a fairly remarkable accomplishment for a queer rom-com—even today, with all the progress that’s been made in inclusion and visibility for the LGBTQ+ community in film. As Prime Video said in its tweet: “History, huh?”

Directed by Matthew López, Red, White & Royal Blue begins not with a kiss but with an international incident. Alex (Taylor Zakhar Perez) is sent to the U.K. to attend a royal wedding on behalf of his mother (Uma Thurman), who is the first female president of the United States. Alex has a contentious history with Henry (Nicholas Galitzine), the “spare” to the throne who is around his same age. When they see each other at the reception, they bicker, which leads to some innocent shoving and, eventually, the entire wedding cake falling on them.

While doing damage control, Alex and Henry’s roasting of each other evolves into obvious flirtation. They kiss. They have sex. They fall in love. Of course, a first son and a prince entering a relationship would be, to repeat Prime Video’s summation, “History, huh?” They grapple not just with their sexual awakenings, but how open to be about their romance with their respective, powerful families—a love that would have global repercussions if and when they ever went public with it.

As is the case whenever there’s queer pop culture pitched toward a mainstream audience, everything from the film’s sex scenes and edginess to the believability of its love story have been dissected by audiences who have now seen the film. Ahead of its premiere, we spoke with López about those pressures, how he reacts to the queer community’s intense scrutiny, and his thought process when it came to filming Alex and Henry’s first kiss and their first time having sex.

This movie has the potential to be foundational for a generation of young people. What were some of the queer pieces of pop culture that were foundational for you?

I am of an age where I got to witness it all. I’m 46, and there’s not been a time that I haven’t been alive that most of queer cinema existed, so I got to access it from a young age in real time. I was actually just talking about how important Gus Van Sant’s [1991 film] My Own Private Idaho was to me when I saw it as a young person. Growing up in that era, most of the films that I was able to sneak off to see without my parents knowing were about death and dying. Even though death haunts that movie, it's a movie about living. I loved that the movie showed this love story between these two men in such a tender, odd, and yet also incredibly heartfelt way. That, for me, was very formative. I will never forget the first time I ever saw Grey Gardens.

The Surprising Big, Gay, Sexy Weekend at the MoviesHEATING UP

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Ha! I don’t think anyone can forget the first time they saw Grey Gardens.

I was in a hotel room in Atlanta with my parents. They were asleep. It was on TV, and I was like, “What is this weird thing?” Crazy bananas. I loved it. Ellen DeGeneres coming out on TV was [also] a huge thing for me. People who weren’t alive then don’t know what that meant, how earthshaking a thing that was.

You said you had to sneak away to watch My Own Private Idaho. I’m curious what it means to you, given that experience, that you’ve now made a mainstream movie that is easily accessible for the new generation. Have you processed that trajectory, from being in the shadows to now creating something so mainstream and public?

I actually haven’t. It’s not lost on me. I’m very fortunate to be my age—other than there are some days I wish I were younger. But I’m very fortunate that my adult life has developed alongside the progression of queer storytelling, especially in cinema. There is a degree of openness and aliveness and access that I could never have dreamed of when I was younger. I hate being that person who is 46 and says, “Well, back in my day…” I don't want younger queer artists or audiences to know anything other than how amazing it is to live in this age.

They have access and options!

I mean, look, we released this movie a week after Heartstopper. Heartstopper is in many ways the antithesis of Red, White & Royal Blue, and yet they both exist in the same universe. And also Young Royals [Netflix’s teen romance series]. So I don’t think anybody who is under the age of 30 thinks that Red, White & Royal Blue being accessible in 240 countries is remarkable. I look at it and I think that’s remarkable.

I remember when the book came out, and a lot of people I knew were talking about it. I bought it at the airport while on vacation and read it on the plane, and thought it was lovely, super-gay, and very hot. Now that it’s a movie, it’s become fodder for discourse. How do you feel about the fact that the story is now thrown to the trenches to be talked about in terms of wider gay culture and gay cinema?

I think Casey McQuiston would challenge the fact that it's only now becoming fodder for discourse.

That’s true. But now that there’s a movie version, it’s on a new level of scrutiny.

Maybe it’s a self-protective thing, but, at the end of the day, my work on the film is done. I have no more responsibility to it after it releases. It’s not mine anymore. It never was mine. It belongs to Amazon. It was temporarily mine out of contractual obligations that the studio entered into. But it’s theirs. And by “theirs,” it really is the audience’s. There’s a saying that I love, which is, “What other people think of me is none of my business.” Which is a hard thing to maintain in the age of Twitter, or X, or whatever we’re calling it these days. It’s a hard thing to do now.

It’s almost impossible to do.

It’s ultimately great that people are talking about it. I hope that more people talk favorably about it than unfavorably about it. There are inevitably going to be things in the movie that I never intended that people see in it. Some of these things I’m going to think are cool. Some of these things I’m going to be appalled at. The one thing that doesn’t ever get transmitted in this discourse is the intention, and unfortunately, my intention stays with me.

Well, you’re talking to me about it. We can talk about your intentions.

Oh, you’re very good. More people saw the trailer for this film in the first hour of its release than ever saw any single production of every single one of my plays combined. The reach of this thing, the ability to reach the world, is unprecedented in my career. So the cacophony of opinions, I’m incapable of processing. It all washes into sort of a generalized reaction. I generally stay away from it.

My hope is that, more often than not, people find in this film something to celebrate, and people find something in this film to cherish. Honestly, there are people whose sole mission in life is to go out into the world and hate everything they see. I generally tend not to make things for those people.

As the person who got to make this movie about two men falling in love, what were you most excited to put your own spin on? The kiss? When Alex and Henry had sex? The flirtation?

We forget that there are so many different genres of storytelling that queer characters have been kept out of. So on the most basic level, I really looked at my favorite old rom-coms. I went back to Bringing Up Baby, which is one of my favorite movies. Katharine Hepburn is Alex and Cary Grant is Henry. It’s the same dynamic. When Harry Met Sally, Moonstruck, Broadcast News—there’s something so deeply pleasing about those movies.

I would definitely agree with that.

I am not not sitting here saying I don’t want people to experience this as a queer movie. Obviously, I do. But I also want people to experience this as a rom-com, period, full-stop, that is queer. I want both. I want to make a movie that is unapologetically queer, and I want to make a movie that is unapologetically a rom-com.

It’s like saying, “Oh, she’s a great female chef,” instead of saying, “She's a great chef.” To say that something is a great queer rom-com is, in some ways, to not include it in the greater pantheon. Yes, of course it’s a queer rom-com. Of course, in every fiber of its being, this is about the fact that these are two men falling in love with each other. But I’m also really excited about being given the chance to take my swing at making a movie the likes of which I’ve always loved, in a way that I understand love, and the way I understand sex, and the way I understand relationships.

What’s a scene that you got to do that with?

In regards to that first kiss, I wanted to make a great, romantic, “movie” first kiss. I wanted to make something that resembled the great kisses that I grew up watching. I wanted to make something as a movie that resembled the banter of the great Preston Sturges movies that I loved and that is in service of telling a story between two men when it comes to the sex. That is where I definitely wanted to make sure the audience knew they were watching a queer movie, because I don’t think you see anything like that in any straight films.

Even the conversation they have before the first time they have sex, where Alex bashfully asks Henry who’s going to do what, is remarkable.

That’s something I was really excited to show and that was something I was really adamant about doing. We had a lot of conversations. You don’t see Harry and Sally have sex. You don’t see Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan have sex. You don’t see that in traditional rom-coms, so does it belong in this rom-com? I would argue that that is one of the things that makes it a queer rom-com: We actually will show that—how we have sex, why we have sex, when we have sex, how often we have sex is a part of who we are.

How did you decide how to shoot the sex scene and what you were going to show?

When it came to actually shooting that scene, I also knew that I didn't want to shoot it in the wide. You could do lots of gymnastics and all that fun stuff [in a wide shot], but at the end of the day, that would be asking two actors to perform a sex scene, as opposed to what I was interested in, which is showing their faces and asking two actors to act a sex scene. What was really going on in that scene for me was what was going on in their heads, in their minds. What is their emotional state?

When you watch the scene back, are you happy with how it turned out?

Yeah, I am, because for me that scene is about this life-changing experience between these two people. For Alex, it is the first time he ever penetrates another man. And for Henry, [Nicholas] and I decided that this was the first time he was ever having sex with someone he really really had a lot of feelings for. We definitely see on their faces—two lives irrevocably altering as a result of that night. I wanted it to be beautiful. I really wanted it to not be so tasteful that it isn't sexy. But I also wanted it to be unambiguously a moment of love, not just a moment of physicality.

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