Taylor Zakhar Perez Fan

In this VF photo exclusive, director and cowriter Matthew López talks about adapting a beloved queer beach read and getting energy from its impassioned fan base: “I knew that this was a story that I absolutely had to tell.”
“I’m used to things not looking the way the fairy tales tell me they’re supposed to,” Matthew López, director and cowriter of the upcoming romantic comedy Red, White & Royal Blue, tells Vanity Fair. He’s talking about his first film, set to get its release amid Hollywood’s ongoing strikes. (“You’re also talking to someone who won Tonys in the midst of pandemics,” López, who became the first Latine writer to win best play, for The Inheritance, quips.) But he could just as easily be referring to film’s dearth of fizzy, feel-good, queer love stories—the kind López will soon share with the world.

Based on Casey McQuiston’s New York Times best-selling novel, Red, White & Royal Blue tells an enemies-to-lovers story about British prince Henry (Cinderella’s Nicholas Galitzine) and American first son Alex Claremont-Diaz (The Kissing Booth’s Taylor Zakhar Perez). After a public snafu that leaves both men with wedding cake on their face, the two high-powered foes find love in the hopeless place known as a public-relations-arranged truce.

“I’m used to things not looking the way the fairy tales tell me they’re supposed to,” Matthew López, director and cowriter of the upcoming romantic comedy Red, White & Royal Blue, tells Vanity Fair. He’s talking about his first film, set to get its release amid Hollywood’s ongoing strikes. (“You’re also talking to someone who won Tonys in the midst of pandemics,” López, who became the first Latine writer to win best play, for The Inheritance, quips.) But he could just as easily be referring to film’s dearth of fizzy, feel-good, queer love stories—the kind López will soon share with the world.

As it turns out, they weren’t the only ones catching feelings. “I read the novel back in early 2020, and I fell madly in love with Henry and Alex,” López says from his home in the UK. “I had never read a book with a character like Alex Claremont-Diaz at the center. As a queer Puerto Rican, I would’ve loved to have met Alex a lot earlier in my life. And I knew that this was a story that I absolutely had to tell.” The adaptation, cowritten with Ted Malawer, marks the feature directorial debut of López, who received his second Tony nomination earlier this year for cowriting the book to Some Like It Hot. “There are a lot of projects that have come and gone in my career that I have had the ability to let go of,” he continues, “but if I wasn’t able to make this movie, it would’ve cost me something. It was really a very, very irresistible passion.”

López also gravitated towards a light-hearted, feature-length project after years spent in the thick of The Inheritance, a seven-hour play often called a spiritual successor to Angels in America. “If not outright strategy to it, there was definitely, I think, clear preference to take on something that wasn’t going to cost me the same as The Inheritance. The Inheritance took a big, big chunk out of me, and I was happy to make that sacrifice,” the playwright says. “I knew, though, that I needed to work on a story after The Inheritance that was going to—not be less challenging, because certainly this hasn’t been in any way less challenging, but that would leave me in a different mood at the end of every day.”

The film is undeniably modern (“We are in a hotel crawling with reporters. If anyone sees you leave this hotel, I will Brexit your head from your body,” Sarah Shahi’s chief of staff warns in the trailer), but López turned to romantic comedies of the past as inspiration: screwball affairs from the ’30s and ’40s like Bringing Up Baby and Sullivan’s Travels, as well as more recent hits like When Harry Met Sally or Moonstruck. All of those films revolve around “very smart, very clever people who often find themselves in over their heads, and the only way to really get themselves out of trouble is to talk their way out,” he explains.

Then there was the matter of finding his leads, roles that have been fancast since the book’s 2019 release. For Henry, a man born to privilege and often spiteful of that fact, López sought someone who would “protect” the character. “Without realizing it, Nick taught me that I was in search of someone who would take care of Henry,” he says. “It felt very safe putting Henry into Nick’s hands.” As for Alex, the rowdier of the two, it was about casting an actor who could “transform himself” over the film’s two-hour run time. “Taylor’s a little more like Alex than Nick is like Henry. But Taylor is not as much of a human cannonball as Alex is,” López says. “And to watch Taylor in the audition process become that reckless and energetic creature was actually really, really fun.” Now, he says, “I genuinely cannot imagine any other two actors other than these two playing these parts.”

Like Alex and Henry, López had to straddle the two high-powered worlds of a US presidency (embodied by Uma Thurman) and British monarchy (that would be Stephen Fry). Luckily, he’s had some experience with foreign affairs. “I’d seen every episode of The West Wing,” says López, who was also a writer on Aaron Sorkin’s HBO series The Newsroom. “I’d seen every movie that was ever set inside the Oval Office. And I’d been living in the UK for a while, so I had a slightly-better-than-an-outsider’s understanding of British culture.”

From the outset, there were two scenes considered make-or-break. One was the wedding cake food fight, a chaotic sequence that, ironically enough, had to be carefully choreographed. Those three days of filming contained “the least bit of goofing off on set,” López explains. “We really had no room for error. And so we all really approached that with a sense of seriousness, which I hope does not in any way translate onscreen.” Then there was Alex and Henry’s romantic stroll through London’s Victoria & Albert Museum. “It’s sort of a dream come true—your own personal night at the museum,” he says of the late-night shoot. “So that was less daunting than an endurance test, but it was just such a magical night for us. And I hope that did translate onto screen.”

Both of those moments live vibrantly in the minds of those who love Red, White & Royal Blue—an impassioned group of people bringing all of their enthusiasm to the movie version when it premieres August 11 on Prime Video. But the film’s director isn’t nervous about answering to an opinionated, online fan base.

“It’s absolutely undeniable that the fans love the book for the same reasons that I do, so I think of myself as one of them,” says López, who himself was excitedly making plans to see Barbie with his husband at the start of our conversation. “You could argue that I’m such a rabid, passionate fan that I made the most expensive bit of fan fiction ever. I hope the fans take solace from the fact that one of them has made this movie.”