Yahoo News ‘Red, White & Royal Blue’ Director Matthew López on the Complexities of Helming an Interracial, “Queer Ass” Love Story
In Matthew López’s Red, White & Royal Blue, queer love is an international incident.
The anticipated big screen adaptation of Casey McQuiston’s bestseller follows the first son of the United States, Alex Claremont-Diaz (Taylor Zakhar Perez), and Britain’s Prince Henry (Nicholas Galitzine) after their lives become diplomatically entwined following a royal wedding cake snafu. Forced into a fake friendship to rehab the approval ratings of Alex’s mother, President Ellen Claremont (Uma Thurman), and salvage the respectability of the Crown, the men discover there may be more love than hate between them — despite an ocean of differences as people and stifling traditions that threaten their ability to be together.
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Marking López’s directorial debut, Red, White & Royal Blue sees the Tony-winning, queer, Latine playwright pull double duty as screenwriter alongside co-writer and fellow stage scribe Ted Malawer — both of whom were fans of the novel. “We were incredibly fortunate Casey McQuiston wrote such an incredible book and trusted us to realize it well,” producer Sarah Schechter tells The Hollywood Reporter in an email. “We all read the book before publishing, so we were also fortunate to have the book connect with such a broad audience and develop such a devoted and loving fan base. Those fans made it easier to get the film made.”
López also serves as an executive producer on the Amazon Studios movie, alongside producers Schechter and Greg Berlanti who, with their company Berlanti-Schechter Films, have helped take LGBTQ stories from the indie space into mainstream film and TV. It’s a true splash into Hollywood for López, with the McQuiston adaptation not only marking the latest addition to the Amazon streamer’s library of LGBTQ-led or inclusive productions but also Prime Video’s second LGBTQ rom-com directorial debut in two years by a notable name after last year’s Billy Porter-helmed Anything’s Possible.
“Amazon stepped up throughout the process — from winning the bidding war to acquire the rights, all the way through production and post. They made sure the film was given incredible resources to fully realize the scope of the story,” Schechter says. “Amazon has made two queer love stories that we were fortunate enough to produce in the past couple years alone. They deserve to be celebrated for such incredible support of LGBTQIA stories.”
As for López, Schechter says the multihyphenate was a wonderful collaborator and “a quick study,” who was not only open about what he didn’t know but “studied hard to be prepared to direct for the first time.”
“I’d seen his big play [The Inheritance]. It was extraordinary. I love Matthew’s work, but he didn’t have many experiences, for example, in camera movement, cranes and lighting and how to do it, and why should he?” says cinematographer Stephen Goldblatt, who shared he and López were frequently “speaking the same language.” “So, I helped introduce to him cinematic ways of looking at material.”
That was in addition to his deep devotion and love for a book “he fell in love with as a reader” and an existing well of knowledge about performance thanks to his theater background. “Like a playwright, he treated the text as a living thing that could always be examined and shaped around the performers,” she says.
“As you say in theatre, it’s the flow within the stage that takes the eye. I could see from his material that Matthew was able to carry forward that idea into the space within the frame when blocking actors that flows using the space within the frame to take the eye,” says Kristina Hetherington, who co-edited the film with Nick Moore. “Matthew’s priorities in terms of editing were always around performance, story and flow. Someone once said editors write with images. Working with Matthew, a gifted writer, was like working alongside a fellow editor, who is fearless about testing ideas because he understands ideas evolve.”
López, meanwhile, credits the studio and his producers for setting him up for success and paving the way for a relatively easy journey getting the film to the screen, especially as a queer filmmaker of color. “There was never a moment where I felt like I wasn’t being set up for success. There was never a moment where this movie didn’t feel like a priority to the people I was making it with,” he tells THR. “I know I’m lucky in that, and I don’t take that for granted.”
“Film and television audiences benefit from diverse perspectives and fresh points of view,” Schechter adds. “Matthew felt so closely aligned to the experience of one of our lead characters and was able to speak so specifically to Alex’s life experience.”
Speaking to THR ahead of the film’s release in a directing capacity (as López is currently on strike as a member of the Writers Guild of America), the filmmaker discussed how deeply personal the film became for him, the creative complexities of telling a “big old queer story” with an interracial relationship at its center, and not just what he thinks about its R-rating but the queer casting debate.
Greg Berlanti, who has helped mainstream LGBTQ stories in movies like Love, Simon, My Policeman and Broken Hearts Club, was one of your producers on this, along with Sarah Schecter. Was having someone who had been in your spot on this helpful as you delivered your directorial debut?
Sarah was my on-set, day-to-day, from the beginning to the end producer on this thing. This was Sarah’s project, which I think is really interesting. But the fact remains that Greg Berlanti was my producer as well, and there were so many times in the process of making this movie that I had the ability to call Greg and ask him for advice. Sarah is like a wunderkind producer, Greg is a queer filmmaker, who is also producing my movie, and I think the movie had a relatively easy journey into the world because of who its producers were. I think that it isn’t just a question of the respect that Greg and Sarah enjoy in the industry. It is also the track record that Greg specifically has as a queer storyteller.
On several occasions, I just needed to check my judgment, which is something you’ve got to do when you’re making a movie, and Greg was always the person [that I could ask], “Am I cutting this for the right reason? Am I keeping it in for the right reason?” It was, keep my head on straight for me because it’s easy to lose your head when you’re making a movie. Greg and Sarah both were such fierce fighters for this film. I think that if there were other producers, it a) may not have gotten made, and b) if it had gotten made, it may not have gotten made with the resources that this movie had. The resources that I had for this movie are not the kind of resources that are usually given to queer romances with a queer filmmaker of color. I don’t think that’s necessarily enough to be the story in and of itself, but that’s Berlanti-Schecter.
You come from Broadway and in terms of your body of work there, you’ve got a deep — and diverse — catalog about people across time, settings, identities who seem to speak to something broached in this film: a desire for self-determination. Is that a theme that matters to you in your work, and what else does matter to you as a storyteller?
If I really thought about it, it’s the same answer as to why I wanted to make this movie as to why I want to tell any story. It’s just like… people. Some Like It Hot, while it obviously is also about Sugar and Joe, and Sue and Osgood, is about Daphne. My way in was Daphne. And when [musical co-writer] Amber [Ruffin] and I were talking about it, when I was talking to [music and lyric writers] Marc [Shaiman] and Scott [Wittman] about it, it’s like… Daphne. There’s not a lot of overlap between me and Daphne, but there was something in Daphne that I just needed to express, that comes from me. So, I think that for me, it’s about character. The world around the character either starts to fill in, or it comes prefilled. It doesn’t matter to me, ultimately, who the character is, as long as I find them fascinating, or if I find them challenging or if I find them upsetting or if I find them in need of protection. I need a hook of some kind, which is why I try not to tell the same story twice. I investigate similar themes, and I think that is probably down to psychology.
I’ve always been fascinated about writers’, filmmakers’ and artists’ output in their characters. I like to think of creative storytelling not necessarily as being project specific, but who are the human beings they have put out into the world. Daniel Plainview may have come from the novel Oil!, and he was definitely refracted through the mind of Paul Thomas Anderson and then handed to Daniel Day-Lewis to create [There Will Be Blood’s] Daniel Plainview — as a character that just came to my head. I don’t know if I ever thought, “Oh, I’m going to write about a prince and an orc.” If I was going to make a movie with the president of the United States in it, I don’t necessarily think I would have engineered it so that it would be Ellen [Claremont] played by Uma [Thurman], but I encountered this constellation of characters in the novel. And, in particular, Alex for me was the way in. Alex was my Daphne.
You talked about self-determination. I think there’s something as a queer Latine man who, even though my experience is different from Alex — Alex is Mexican, I’m Puerto Rican; my mom’s not President of the United States; I spent most of my life anonymous, and I can still walk through the world primarily anonymously — there’s something about Alex that made me go, “Yeah, I get why he’s a human cannonball.” I’ve always seen Alex as a human cannonball, and I understand why he feels he has to be one in the world because I’ve had to be one in the world.
You create films like Barbie, you create Oppenheimer, you create There Will Be Blood, but for me, those are just merely a collection of characters. Barbie is a constellation of characters, Oppenheimer‘s a collection of characters. Doesn’t matter that Oppenheimer is filled with people who really existed. You show me a collection of characters, and I will tell you who you are.
With the re-rise of rom-coms, stories led by interracial relationships have had an increased presence in the genre. Those couplings, however, have mostly leaned into a combination of a white character and a character of color, with the rare explanation or exploration of what that means for them as a couple. In this story, though, the concept of “privilege” is entangled and addressed within their romance. Casey, of course, created these characters and that dynamic, but how much of that part of their story mattered to you?
It’s interesting because it’s obviously why I was drawn to the story. It’s a romantic comedy, first and foremost. That said, it doesn’t mean it can’t be about something. Just because it operates on the logic of romance, doesn’t mean it isn’t about something, or else I don’t know if I would have been drawn to it. It’s why I was drawn to Alex. I, too, am biracial. My mom’s white, my dad’s Puerto Rican. I am in a biracial relationship. My husband is white. These are conversations that he and I had for 18 years and most explicitly have had for the past three years locked down in our house together in the spring and summer 2020, having difficult conversations.
There is something for me about seeing Alex and telling his story. It is not surprising to me that it’s his white parent who’s the president. That there’s a woman president is amazing, and that she’s played by Uma Thurman is a dream come true. But it isn’t surprising that the white parent became president when your father is Mexican. Now, you could argue well, in the book, his father’s not an immigrant and in the movie, he’s an immigrant, therefore he’s not eligible to be president. Yeah, sure, fine. But the fact is that Alex is also in his position temporarily. Alex is going to be there four to eight years. Henry is going to be there for life. Taylor and I talked about it, and Clifton [Collins Jr.] and I talked about [it], and Rachel [Hilson] and I talked about it. But we also didn’t need to talk about it. I believe, on the one hand, it is insufficient to simply present it, and on the other hand, it is too much for a movie like this to overly explore. The truth of the matter is, it’s a movie about a young, biracial, Mexican American, bisexual man who has been given an opportunity to influence his country’s trajectory in ways that most people like him don’t get to. That’s called fantasy, and that’s why we love it.
But I think there’s something psychologically about Alex in the book that I was able to take and work with Taylor to create a character who then is believable onscreen. I think that when you start to get into the business of, “This has never been seen before. This is unprecedented,” it starts to sound like, “Eat your vegetables,” and nobody wants to eat their vegetables on a Friday night. There’s nothing wrong with eating your vegetables. I have a healthy, balanced diet, both nutritionally and in what I consume as a viewer. I seek out the “eat your vegetables” movies. But the delivery system of Hollywood has always been entertainment. Thereby, it’s the delivery system of American culture, and our country’s greatest export is its culture. For decades, that culture was generally one monolithic thing, and then in the last — what would you say, 15, 20 years? — that has shifted tremendously.
Who gets to tell stories is changing. What those stories are going to be about — who they’re about — is changing. So, it’s a delicate balance of doing exactly that but also knowing that my first and last job is to entertain. Alex is unlike many characters — or any character — you’ve ever seen in a movie like this. That was born into Casey’s novel, and it doesn’t matter to me that Casey’s white. Casey created this person, and I was tasked with the responsibility, alongside Taylor, of bringing him into vivid life.
Like Barbie and Ken dolls, rom-coms have shaped who we see and consider desirable, from gender to weight to race. Characters who look — but maybe don’t act — like Henry have dominated this genre space, and like the novel, you seem to be playing with historical rom-com conventions here, with your entire cast of characters. It makes Red, White & Royal Blue feel like it’s whispering something kind of powerful about how we see people.
I think that’s ultimately what I want to say. That really does get down to why I was drawn to the book. The book was Alex, and the reason that the movie is told primarily from Alex’s point of view. I can only access Henry as he relates to Alex, as a filmmaker whose last name is López. And it doesn’t mean that I care any less about Henry. Henry has created in me this enormous empathy. It’s hard sometimes to find compassion for royalty in the 21st century. That Henry explicitly demands that from the audience because of how fragile; how wounded; how easy it is to hurt Henry; how victimized he is by his family. So beautifully played by Nick, it gets very easy to care about Henry. But still, the only way I could access Henry is through Alex’s eyes. And exactly what Alex sees in Henry is that fragility. Alex’s first mistake is seeing in Henry the externals — the privilege. He’s white and impossible to emotionally access, all the things that he’s told he’s supposed to be in the world. Then, Alex gets under his skin and gets to the heart of whom that young man is.
Alex is actually very indestructible in many ways. He was raised to be indestructible by his parents. Alex was forced to be indestructible by his situation before he became the president’s son. If you are the son of a Mexican immigrant who has made his way up to becoming a congressman — if you are the son of a poor Texan white woman who worked your way up to become the most powerful person in the world — you know the first thing you have to become is indestructible. So what’s interesting is that Alex is seemingly indestructible and Henry could be blown over by a stiff breeze. He’s so fragile. I think there’s something really, really amazing about the paradigm shifts in those two characters — that Alex is the indestructible one and Henry is the fragile one. And I think that that is one of the things that really drew me into those characters
And I think it’s true. If we see romantic comedies that have people who are like Alex in it — and are like Henry — if we can really mess with the DNA of what Hollywood bread and butter looks like in terms of storytelling and take those things and turn them into something that looks exactly like it used to but also not at all what it used to? (Pauses.) This film’s structure is such a classic structure. We haven’t done anything to the superstructure of the romantic comedy at all. It’s still built the same way, is still the same architectural design. But you’re making an entirely new building that looks different and that is used differently by different people. It was a pleasure to be on set with Taylor, Rachel, Malcolm [Atobrah] and to have a majority of the principal cast be people of color, to let that suffuse the story but never supplant the purpose, which is to make people feel. We have the opportunity, we have the right, and we have the ability to make people feel by taking those old architectural plans and making our own buildings from them.
You’ve mentioned several of your own connections to the film and your desire as the filmmaker to connect with and map a human experience through characters. Is there a moment in this adaptation that reflects you and that connection best?
There’s a scene in the movie that is very much me, which I gave Taylor after they’ve had sex for the first time. They’re there in pillow talk mode, and he tells Henry about what it’s like to be the son of an immigrant with a Z in your last name. One of the things growing up the nephew of [Tony-winning actress and singer] Priscilla López, it wasn’t until I moved to New York to work in theater myself that I understood my aunt is beloved. Not just by me as her nephew, but that she’s beloved in the industry and theater. She made it OK for so many people with z’s in their last name to go out in the world and feel confident. Mandy Gonzalez, she and I have always talked about that. It was really important to me to talk about growing up with a Z in your last name and even just how our names are pronounced, the spellings of our names sometimes if you have Latin ancestry. To have to answer for your name has always been something for me that I struggled with until I stopped struggling with it. So, I needed to put that into Alex’s story and when it came time to shoot that scene again, it was something I didn’t have to explain to Taylor Zakhar Perez. He got it instantly. The only thing that I did screw him up with is like, “We’re going to do this [scene] as a oner, and we’re going to do it as a top shot that starts in a wide shot and comes all the way down to your face, and we’re not going to leave this scene until you get it right in one.”
You’ve spoken about how you wanted to balance acknowledging Alex’s identity without letting that overtake the love story. But this is, obviously, a queer story. There’s a queer couple at the center, coming out stories. How much did you want this to be watched as that queer story versus a love story?
I don’t mean to say that it isn’t important to me. That’s important or else I wouldn’t be telling the story. But it can’t be the sole reason the story is being told. The sole reason the story’s being told is it’s a good story. It’s a good story, because it’s a queer story, but being a queer story isn’t sufficient. It can’t just be that or else it’s just ticking a box. And you don’t have a story if you don’t have queerness. This doesn’t work. It might, but it won’t be as good. It could, maybe, if you get Nora Ephron to write it. But it wouldn’t be this thing. So it is woven in the DNA of a thing.
I guess there’s something very out of fashion about that. It isn’t about the politics of respectability, which is a false choice to make. And it’s funny to say this about a story about a nominal prince, but there’s something really, really beautiful about ordinariness. It isn’t trying to ask the audience to see queer characters the same way they see straight characters. It’s about looking at the soul of the human. Period. Full stop. And the soul of the humans that I often like to investigate are queer souls inhabiting queer bodies. To that extent, they are neither more or less queer than they need to be. This idea that there is the right way to be queer, that there is an insufficiency to someone else’s queerness, is as limiting on people as the expectation that they be straight. That they observe a binary. So, for me, the queerness of the story is inextricable with the narrative, and therefore that was that.
I thought the story has always been matter-of-factly queer. It’s just a big old queer story, and yet it also is just this… (Pauses.) No one ever talks about Harry and Sally being such paragons of heterosexuality. No one talks about straightness. I guess they do now in relation to talking about it the differences, but at the time, nobody talked about, “This is such an interesting explanation of heterosexuality.” They were Harry and Sally. I think, for me, I want them to be Alex and Henry. Harry and Sally don’t work as queer characters. They work as straight characters. They are as inextricable as Alex and Henry’s queerness.
Because I’m old enough to remember when that movie came out — I’m not old enough to have seen it (Laughs.) — they were talking about Nora’s writing, Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan’s performances, and their chemistry. My hope is that people come to this queer ass movie and talk about Taylor and Nick’s chemistry and talk about their performances and talk about the music in the movie. I want to be afforded the exact same consideration that Rob Reiner and Nora Ephron got, that John Patrick Shanley and Norman Jewison and Cher and Nick Cage got from Moonstruck. I want that, and I don’t want to have to do it in a way that looks like Moonstruck or When Harry Met Sally. I want to do it in my way. I hope this does feel like the work of a queer Latin filmmaker who was raised on Hollywood romantic comedies.
But I also don’t want people to feel obligated to see this movie for any other reason other than the desire to be entertained. I have a right to entertain in my way. I am using characters that I understand, and I trust that people’s understanding of what is entertaining — just like people’s understanding of what is attractive — will grow; has grown and will continue to grow.
Let’s talk about their chemistry. There was one early interview with Taylor and Nicholas, which published before the SAG-AFTRA strike, that caught some attention online because they had this almost infectious energy — a casual, reciprocal charm — that was hard to ignore. And it certainly plays out onscreen. How did you end up finding and casting them?
I wish I could tell you that I walked on set with some grand plan to create that, but it was dumb fucking luck. The smartest thing I did was cast those two, and then I just got to show up every day at work and tell them where to stand. But the casting process was arduous. It was a long, long, long, tedious process. It had to be because I couldn’t get it wrong. Because if I got it wrong, there would be no movie. We actually talked about, especially with Alex, if we don’t find them, there’s no movie. If we can’t find Alex, we’re just not making this movie. Amazon will be out of the option date, but there’s no point in making a movie if you don’t have the right actors, and in particular, the right Alex. To add to that, eventually, I found Nick.
I knew for Henry I needed to find an actor who would be a caretaker for Henry. Nick is not at all like Henry — in any way. He didn’t need to be. What I needed to find in Henry was an actor who would take this fragile character and hold him in his hand, and protect him. I didn’t need to find an actor to play Henry. I needed to find a caretaker for Henry. Once I found Nick, I knew I had that. With Taylor, it was much more difficult because the Alexs of the world exist in so many different ways. There are so many different kinds of Alex Claremont-Diaz in the world, and threading the needle on the specificity of what Casey wrote that I wanted to honor — which is that wicked language-forward intelligence; that easy charm — that took a lot of time to find. Then, Taylor showed up. He isn’t at all like Alex, either. I watched Taylor in his auditions turn into this human cannonball. Nick holds the character, and Taylor had to turn himself into the character.
Then, I discovered that was the easy part because what if they don’t work together? What if it’s just oil and water? Nick was in New Orleans doing a movie, and Taylor was in L.A., and I was in London, and I was like, “Let’s just all fly to New Orleans and get in a room.” Because I’m from the theater, I just wanted to get in a room with them. It was “Nope, nope, nope. Zoom.” I was told if they had chemistry on Zoom, they’ll have chemistry on set. And I was like, “What if they don’t have chemistry on Zoom, but they do in person?!” Anyway, long story short, we got on a Zoom, and within five minutes, I texted Sarah Schechter, my producer, and I said there they are. It was just so evident. They were able to do what they do in this movie because they are two fundamentally different people who respected and trusted each other, and they decided to trust each other from the beginning. They were both smart enough to know that they needed each other.
And I think that in some ways they were holding on to each other for dear life while making this movie. I don’t think that there was a moment in the process where one of them wasn’t a little scared and the other one was a little brave. They just took turns being that person — sometimes daily, sometimes hourly. I got lucky. I got two remarkable young actors who needed each other, and I think that in some weird sort of alchemy, we created the situation by which they actually became Henry and Alex together.
You’ve been telling queer stories and thus casting queer characters your entire career. But the debate around auditioning and casting gay characters with consideration of actors’ sexuality took a different turn with the news around young Heartstopper actor Kit Connor. As someone of the community that is casting for LGBTQ roles, where do you fall in that conversation in terms of your own projects?
Sexuality is a long journey. It’s a lifelong journey because sexuality isn’t at the basis — sexuality is who you fancy, who you fall in love with, who you’re attracted to. But who you’re attracted to — the who — is the most important thing. It’s not a type. It’s a person. The line Alex has in the movie is, “I fell in love with a person who happens to be a man and that man happens to be a prince.”
To me, casting actors to play characters is so much about who they are as spirits; what their souls are like; what their psyches are composed of. I know so many people in my life who thought they knew who they were at 20 and then discovered at 30 that they were somebody else and that at 40 they were someone else still. Sexuality is not a fixed thing. I also know from experience in other projects that playing a specific role changes the way you think about who you are. You have to change in order to play a part. You have to change in order to pretend to be someone you’re not. The work we do, we’re not tax attorneys. The work actors do changes them. I’ve seen it happen so many times with roles that have nothing to do with sexuality or little to do with sexuality. An actor’s job is to transform themselves and to challenge what they believe about themselves. I can’t ask somebody to be something they’re not in order to get a job because I’m already asking them to be something they’re not, which is this character.
I could never tell anybody how to make their movie, and I could never presume to tell anybody how to cast their movie. By the same token, I don’t ever want to be told by anybody how I should make my stories or the criteria upon which I should hire the actors that I want to hire. It isn’t unimportant, but I find that it is oftentimes the least salient part of what makes an actor special. And the thing that makes most actors special — the actors that I want to work with — are those ineffable things. It’s Uma, and it’s what makes Uma, Uma. It’s what makes Rachel Hilson, Rachel Hilson. Rachel Hilson is the perfect example. We saw so many people for Nora, and then I watched Rachel, and I worked with her in her audition, and I was like, there you are. There’s that creature that is Nora Holleran. I have to apply that same metric to every character that I cast and every actor I work with.
This film got an R-rating, which when you watch it, doesn’t really feel earned. But there is a history in cinema and on TV of work with LGBTQ characters or themes being labeled “more mature.” Were you actually going for an R-rated film, and does the rating ultimately matter to you?
I was not hemmed in by a rating. Contractually, I was able to deliver an R-rated movie. Therefore, I did not have to chase the PG-13 rating. I could make the movie that I wanted to make. I mean, I couldn’t deliver NC-17, and with this one, I don’t think I could if I tried… but maybe? I probably could. (Laughs.) But the rating wasn’t my concern at all. I was making the movie that I thought was the right movie for the story and for the characters. But I was surprised that we got an R rating. I didn’t think we would after I sat and watched the movie that I had made. I was like, “Oh, this is PG-13.” (Laughs.) Great, more people will see it than otherwise. Then the rating came back, and I was like, “Oh.” And I didn’t have to be told why. I was told by the MPAA what I could do to get a PG-13 rating. And I was like, “Nah. Nah.” And the studio said, “Nah.” There was never a conversation.
There was not once a conversation, but it is not lost on me, and it wasn’t lost on my producers either. I just don’t believe that the movie that I made and the scenes that I shot, if it had been a heterosexual couple, would have gotten an R rating. I just don’t believe it. And maybe I’m wrong. I would love to be proven wrong, but I don’t think that I would be. So does it matter to me as a filmmaker? No, because I was never asked to change anything by anyone. No more or less than any filmmaker without a final cut. But the other thing that is missing from that conversation, and it is only tangential to the specific sexuality of it, which is, if I had put six bullets into the prince, I still would have gotten a PG-13 rating. Six bullets. PG-13. One cock? R.
Interview edited for length and clarity.
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