One of those fairy-tale romances where lovers gaze into each other’s eyes and the whole world falls away, Red, White & Royal Blue, which premiered in August on Prime Video, has already been crowned a hit, with a number-one debut on the streamer and rampant social media buzz about this charming adaptation of Casey McQuiston’s 2019 bestselling novel.

Viewers around the globe have fallen in love with the jet-setting love story of U.S. President’s son Alex Claremont-Diaz and England’s Prince Henry. That love — or thirst, more accurately — extends to the talented actors portraying Alex and Henry, Taylor Zakhar Perez and Nicholas Galitzine, whose undeniable chemistry convinces that these two handsome princes are made for each other. But love that looks that easy can come really hard.

“I spent about five months casting this movie,” says Matthew López, who directed from a script co-written with Ted Malawer. “I was very hopeful that we would find people, but I also wasn’t entirely certain we could. I told my producers, ‘Look, we can’t make this movie with the almost-right cast. We have to make this movie with the right cast. And if we don’t find the right actors, we really shouldn’t make this movie.'”

López — Tony-winning playwright of The Inheritance and the book for musical Some Like It Hot, which earned a landmark Best Actor Tony for nonbinary-identifying star J. Harrison Ghee — was making his film directorial debut with Red, White & Royal Blue, and he didn’t want to risk it on the wrong Alex and Henry.

“So we really, really — and I mean this quite literally — saw hundreds, hundreds, and hundreds of actors, especially for Alex,” he says. “I was amazed that there were that many viable Latine actors out there for this role. It was pretty heartening.”

López’s strong affinity for Alex and his background had been a major driving factor for getting involved in the project. “I had never read a book with a character like Alex Claremont-Diaz…at the center of it,” recalls the Florida native, who shares many things in common with Texas-born-and-raised Alex.

“I am a biracial, Latine queer man who has a white mother and a Puerto Rican father, and Alex has a white mother and a Mexican father.” In the film, Alex’s mom happens to be the President of the United States, played by Uma Thurman, and his dad is a U.S. Congressman, played by Clifton Collins, Jr.

But, as is pointed out in the story, Alex’s parents worked their way up the political and social ladder. He didn’t grow up privileged. “We were both raised working-class in the American South,” López notes. “There’s a lot I identify with Alex.” So it stands to reason that López took his time to find his man.

“Taylor arrived at one point in the process, and I was like, ‘Wow, you’re really great,'” López recalls. “Then the same thing happened with Nick, and I kept putting them through their paces. I kept going back and doing work sessions with them every couple of weeks. And then we had whittled it down to a few people, and I knew that it was really Taylor and Nick. I knew it.”

Still, they had to clear one more hurdle.

“I put them together in a chemistry read, and it had to be on Zoom, unfortunately, because we were all in different cities,” he says. “Taylor was in L.A., Nick was in New Orleans, and I was in London. And within five minutes, it was so obvious to everybody that they had tremendous chemistry. They instantly liked each other. They instantly knew how to just play together, how to invent together. It’s funny, after a five-month, very exhaustive process, it ended very quickly. We were like, ‘Well, there they are. We’ll make a movie.'”

METRO WEEKLY: I’m going to start with a really D.C. question because an aspect of the movie that I was fascinated by –- and I wasn’t expecting to be so fascinated by it — was the portrayal of this nation’s first female presidency, which it seemed like everybody had given a lot of thought. So what are your thoughts on the fact that we have never had a female head of state?

MATTHEW LÓPEZ: Well, honestly, it isn’t very surprising that we haven’t yet had a female head of state. It’s not a great country to be a woman in right now. And until it is, I have serious doubts that America is ready for one, which is sad because I think America could use one.

But the old saying is, “In a democracy, you get the government you deserve.” Look, maybe, crazy enough as it seems, one day enough people will have seen Uma Thurman as the President of the United States and go, “You know what, maybe we’ll take a swing at Gretchen Whitmer now. Maybe we’ll try out somebody who isn’t a man. And maybe it won’t be as terrible as we seem to fear it will be. Maybe a female president will be the most normal thing ever.”

One of the things that we were really eager to do with this movie is actually to make the first female president be just sort of like a normal thing. Uma and I had a lot of conversations about it, and one of the things I said is that we need to make sure that we create a world in which it’s just Tuesday. It’s just Tuesday, and you are the President and you are a woman. And I think that she really responded to the idea that we were already living in the post-newness of it. And she was quite simply the President.

MW: She was really credible as such. It’s interesting you bring up the word fear because that is the question: What are people afraid will happen if a woman holds that office?

LÓPEZ: Yeah, I couldn’t answer it because if there’s one thing I can’t understand it’s other people’s fear. I understand my own, but I don’t understand other people’s. I fear criminals becoming President of the United States. I fear racists and misogynists becoming President of the United States. I fear rapists becoming President of the United States. And unless a woman is one of those things, I don’t really fear that.

MW: Put that way, I don’t see how a lot of people couldn’t see it that way, but a lot of people don’t. So, on the subject of relating to Alex Claremont-Diaz in different ways, were you ever interested in getting into politics like him?

LÓPEZ: It’s funny you asked that. When I was a teenager, I was so into politics. I was, let’s see, 15, 16 when Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992. And that was an exciting, exciting time to be an American. That felt game-changing. It felt game-changing the same way it did in 2008. For different reasons, but still as galvanizing and as paradigm-shifting as that.

And yeah, there was a time I wanted to get into politics. And you know what’s so sad, actually, I know this for a fact — I never articulated it to anyone — but even at 16 and 17, I kind of understood without yet knowing it that I was gay, and implicitly I knew that meant I couldn’t be in politics, which is pretty sad.

I’m pretty happy with the life I’ve chosen — I’m not complaining and I’m probably a happier person because of it. And I’m not suggesting that I am what the nation needed, but I do think that there may be a lot of people who see the way that politics operates nowadays and say to themselves, “No, thank you.” And because of that, we probably have lost out on truly what the nation needs and truly what communities need. And it’s sad.

Politics used to be, at its best in America, things that people who were really passionate about service did. It’s what drove Barack Obama to be in politics. It drove a lot of people to be into politics. But now I think most people would rather go into the tech industry.

MW: Or they become — I don’t know how you’d classify somebody like Greta Thunberg or Malala — alt-politicians, not really politicians.

LÓPEZ: Yeah. But the Greta Thunberg’s and the Malala’s, there was always a space for them. I don’t know if the politicians were ever drawn from that group. Throughout history you saw people filling that role. But I do think that you’ve got a lot of great minds in this country who probably decide that it’s just not worth getting into politics.

MW: That relates to my next question, because Alex has a line about growing up in Texas as a kid with a last name that ends with Z, which is I guess something else you can relate to, Florida style.

LÓPEZ: And Taylor Zakhar Perez also. Taylor and I talked about that scene a lot as being something that we both understood. My aunt Priscilla Lopez is a beloved, beloved stage actor. She was in the original cast of A Chorus Line. And there’s a story that she tells about Mandy Gonzalez, who was in In the Heights with her, and Mandy once told Priscilla that Priscilla made it okay for her to be someone with a Z in her last name. And that was a thing that Taylor and I spent a lot of time discussing as well. It was important to me that that scene be in the movie. There was never a chance in hell that that scene was ever getting cut.

MW: At any point in the casting process were you or your fellow producers concerned about — and I’m not asking how these actors identify — but were any of you concerned about casting queer actors in these roles?

LÓPEZ: When we talk about representation, I think we’re talking about a multitude of things. And sometimes it all just gets smooshed into one general idea of what representation is. The first thing that, for me, what representation is, is a representation of different characters on screen, different characters on stage. Characters who don’t look like the characters that I grew up watching on television and in movies. And Alex Claremont-Diaz is a perfect example of that.

And then you are talking about representation of who has the ability to be considered for roles. Back in the day, queer actors were not even allowed to be considered for queer roles, let alone get them. And for me, what has been most important in the casting of this film is that across the board in every role — not just Alex and Henry — that queer actors be given a chance to be seen and therefore be known. Because when you’re an actor, you don’t book every gig. You book a sliver of the gigs that you’re up for.

The point is to work, of course, but before you work, the point is to be known. And for so long, queer actors have not even been allowed to be known by casting directors, by directors, by producers, by studios. So for me, what was important is that people have a chance to be seen, and everybody deserves a chance to be seen who is reasonably appropriate for the part. When it came to casting these roles, the only criteria I had for Henry, for Alex, for Ellen, for Oscar, for Philip, for Bea, for all of them —

MW: Amy [portrayed by trans actress Aneesh Sheth].

LÓPEZ: Amy! Is that they inhabit the spirit of the character, that I see in them the character that Casey wrote and the character that I’m bringing to life on screen. So that, for me, was the most intentional part of the casting process.

MW: One reason I bring it up is because I’m part of the queer audience who wants to see our lives represented, and some of that is sexuality and heat. For example, Supernova with Stanley Tucci and Colin Firth — they are fantastic actors whom I love, but their kisses looked like… They threw me out of the movie. That does not happen with Red, White & Royal Blue. There’s hot lovemaking in this movie.

LÓPEZ: [Laughs.] I want to get that on a poster, that there’s hot lovemaking in this movie. I need that on a poster.

MW: There is hot lovemaking in this movie, despite the fact that it’s really a PG-13 sort of treatment of romance, it doesn’t show a lot. It’s tastefully sexy. As I’m going to imagine this was your first time directing love scenes on film, what was your strategy of getting it how you wanted it?

LÓPEZ: I had two very seemingly diametrically opposed objectives for those scenes that I needed to figure out how to pull off at the same time. And that is where my intimacy coordinator, Robbie Taylor Hunt, was my closest partner in this project.

I wanted to create a scene, especially in the Paris lovemaking scene, in which it was unambiguous to the audience what was going on, and it was unambiguous to people who have experience with this kind of sex that the filmmaker has been to this rodeo a few times himself. It needed to have an authenticity to it, but it also needed to have an unshowy and unpretentious authenticity to it. It needed not to point to itself. It needed to simply be. I knew that the most powerful form of representation and authenticity in this scene was to simply be.

And the other thing I needed to do was make sure that this scene, before it was about anything else, was about the emotional experience that these two characters are having. Because if it wasn’t, it goes back to my original mandate for this film: If it doesn’t help you understand the character, it doesn’t belong in the movie. And I knew implicitly that this scene would help us understand the characters. It’s the first time that Alex is having sex with a man. And Nick and I decided together, as director and actor, that this was the first time Henry was having sex with someone he had feelings for, genuine feelings for.

 

MW: That comes through.

LÓPEZ: It’s a life-changing night for both characters. And it can also be — and hopefully one assumes — it was a pretty damn good night, too. So I had to do both things. And it was important that we do both things. It was important that it looked real.

So Robbie and I decided in the whole totality of the lovemaking cycle — I don’t know what you call it — from start to finish, what was the moment we were going to really, really focus on? And let’s focus on one moment and execute that as well as we could. And so in intimacy coordinator-speak, we decided on the “moment of insertion,” and we decided that that was going to be the thing that we did. Because that was, for both characters, probably the most vulnerable moment in the whole night for them.

And of course, as a storyteller, I knew that, “Well, let’s go to the place where both characters are the most vulnerable.” So we did that. We spent a lot of time rehearsing with the actors, and we spent a lot of time talking about it, the four of us together. Robbie spent a lot of time working with them alone. And it’s a testament to a lot of things. It’s a testament to Robbie’s great skill as an intimacy coordinator. It’s a testament to our actors’ great sensitivity and talents and dedication. And perhaps it’s a testament to the fucking obstinate tenacity of a film director who’s just sort of going to do what he set out to do.

When we got the R rating for the movie, I was both simultaneously surprised and not surprised. Because I knew at the end of the day that I’ve seen far more graphic sex scenes in movies. It was never my point to make a graphic sex scene. I wanted to make an honest sex scene, and I wanted to make something that really was emotionally resonant, that looked and felt authentic. But I couldn’t help but feel as though, if it had been a man and a woman, it would not have received that rating.

But that’s perhaps unprovable. What is provable is that there are far more violent films that have received PG-13 ratings. More violent than we are sexual. You think about The Dark Knight, which is a masterpiece. It’s a film I love. That is a very violent movie. And that movie is PG-13. And my film, I would consider to be mildly sexual, and we get an R rating. So at the end of the day, even if it isn’t about orientation, even if it isn’t about two boys fucking, which it is, but let’s pretend it isn’t, then I really do question the MPA’s values and the MPA’s prioritizing violence over intimacy.

MW: Well, they’ve had that problem since the beginning. I think part of the authenticity of the scene, and I guess it would be the issue some people would have with it, is that you really can tell what everybody’s doing.

LÓPEZ: It was important to me that we know. And I tell you what? It’s important to me that the people who know what they’re doing, because they’ve done it, know what they’re doing. It’s important to me that the people who know what they’re doing, just because they’re modern people living in the modern world, know what they’re doing. And it was also important to me that people who have no idea what they’re doing, suddenly know what they’re doing.

MW: Talking about representation, Alex is bisexual, which is really cool. I’m part of the generation — and you might be too — that it’s only really recently that people have stopped snickering and putting bisexual in quotes and really accepting that as an orientation. Were you ever a skeptic of bisexuality, or have you always believed?

LÓPEZ: No, I’m as guilty as most people in my generation of degrading the importance of the bisexual identity. It’s unfortunately how we were raised as gay men in the ’90s. I remember very, very clearly in my twenties dating a guy who identified as bisexual, and I remember having a problem with it. I was like 23 or 24. And I’m not proud of that, but that was the discourse at the time. And it was so shockingly normalized within the queer community, and most specifically among gay men.

I think what’s happened is that those of us who were born in the late ’70s, I don’t think it’s that we grew any inherently wiser. I just think that there started to be a lot more younger people than us in the world who started dictating the terms of the conversation. And they took from us the primacy of being the only voices in the room.

The younger generations of queer people and straight people, and those who don’t identify, looking at the array of identities and not placing a primacy of one over the other, I think it was pretty humbling for a lot of us who are older to witness. Because when you look at it, it sounds so simple and it sounds so obvious. And it’s sort of embarrassing, and it’s sad that it wasn’t obvious to us. It was probably obvious to a lot of us, but those voices weren’t heard. So here I am at 46 now and I’m making my first movie, and its central character is bisexual.

And the thing about it is that I never talk about this publicly because, I don’t know, it’s just sort of, I guess we were trained not to talk about it: I identify as gay, but I’ve had relationships with women, and it was long after I started having relationships with men. There was a time in my life when I identified as bisexual and that kind of fell away.

MW: To yourself or to other people?

LÓPEZ: To other people too, in college. I think there was such a stigma around bisexuality at the time. Even to the degree that I felt I had to hide my past relationships with women in order to feel accepted as a gay man. I had to pretend that that part of me didn’t exist.

I still find women attractive, I do find there’s beauty and sexual desire for women, perhaps not as strongly as I do for men, but that it exists in me. And I think there’s also some of the perils of just putting ourselves into categories, into boxes because we then have to act it. And we maybe even try and swallow and hide who we are, what our desires are.

One of the things that I think was so beautiful about the story that Casey wrote, is that Alex is such a refreshing character because Alex is so clearly, very definitively bisexual, and that he might even be, I think, maybe that sociologists would term him as bisexual preferring women. He just happens to find himself really preferring Henry, and it surprises him.

There’s a scene in the movie with Nora, in which he says, “I can wrap my head around being into guys, what I’m really confused about is being into Henry.” And I love that there is such an easy acceptance to Alex and who he’s attracted to. And that for me was something so unusual about the story and that was so refreshing, and that I wanted to bring to life.

MW: I think people who are bisexual will feel represented. And as someone tells him in the movie, the B is not silent.

LÓPEZ: That is one of my favorite lines in the book, and in preview screenings that we’ve done and fan screenings, that line has gotten an enormous cheer. An enormous cheer.

MW: Now I want to ask you about your other work. First, I did not see The Inheritance on Broadway.

LÓPEZ: Shame on you!

MW: I know, I know. It really is a shame on me, because everything I’ve read about it, I would want to. I did see Some Like It Hot. But I’m going to start with a question about the drag musical drama The Legend of Georgia McBride, which you wrote. I saw a production here at Round House a few years ago that I really enjoyed. Has anybody tried to do that on Broadway?

LÓPEZ: Yes.

MW: What happened?

LÓPEZ: Wrong producers, wrong approach. Fell apart.

MW: What about a Georgia McBride movie?

LÓPEZ: Yeah, I’d like that one day. That is something that I can definitely see being a thing in the world.

MW: I don’t know if you know I had an opportunity after seeing Some Like It Hot to interview J. Harrison Ghee for Metro Weekly.

LÓPEZ: My darling J. Oh! [Bowing.] I do this because I don’t know what else to do when invoking their name. J., I have to do that.

MW: It was a great conversation. And I like that you did that, because they talked about their ministry, and I was like, “What’s your ministry? Tell me all about it.”

LÓPEZ: You could spend hours and days interviewing J. and still not get the whole story. J. is just an endless font of fascination to me.

MW: Something I told them was that going into Some Like It Hot, I was a huge fan of the movie, of Billy Wilder, in particular. Jack Lemmon is literally my favorite actor of that era.

LÓPEZ: Me too, actually.

MW: I had a really ingrained point of view, and I did not expect or know how much your story might diverge from that. I wasn’t prepared for it, but I was won over because of what the story is and what it says, and what it means. How did you go into it? Were you a fan of the movie? Did you know how you wanted Daphne’s story to be different than the film?

LÓPEZ: Yeah. It’s why I wanted to do the show. It’s so funny because I do really like that movie, but it’s never been one of my favorites. It’s one of my mother’s favorite movies so I saw it a lot as a kid, and that might have something to do with it. But when I was asked if I wanted to do it, I went back and I rewatched it, and my first thought was, “You can’t make this work. This will never work. It’s just too perfect as a movie.”

So I was like, nah, I don’t want to do it. And then I was like, the only way I could do this is if I could just mess with it, because I don’t see what the point is of doing a musical adaptation of a movie if it just is exactly like the movie. And I kind of flippantly just said, “Well, if I can change everything, then I’ll do it.” And the producers were like, “Go ahead, do that. Yeah, that’s fine.” And I was like, “Really?”

And then I was like, alright, well then what would I do with it if I could? And it became very clear to me, and in talking to Marc [Shaiman] and Scott [Wittman] and Casey [Nicholaw], and then eventually to Amber [Ruffin], it was always about Daphne. From the moment we conceived of it as a musical, it was a musical about Daphne, which isn’t to say that it also wasn’t about Joe and Sugar and Osgood and Sue, but Daphne was the reason we decided to make the show.

And we realized that we had an opportunity to take something that was very familiar and very old, and turn it into something very new and very now. And use this thing as an opportunity to make something that was fresh again, just as fresh now as the movie was in 1959. But the great challenge with that goal was that your goal is only as good as your ability to pull it off, and your ability to pull it off is determined by who’s playing the part.

Enter J., who came to us in a workshop. I can’t speak for anybody else on the project, but that was the first time I ever encountered J. I have never seen J. do anything else. I never saw J. in Kinky Boots. I never saw J. in Chicago. I never saw J. do anything but Some Like It Hot. So I had the opportunity to just imagine J. as Daphne, and suddenly we had an actor to write for, and that was the game changer. When we had J., we had a goal, we had something to write. We had someone and something to write to. And the show succeeds for many reasons. The cast across the board is stellar and wonderful, but we got to pull off our vision for the show because of J.

MW: The impact of their talent and their just existing inspired you in your writing, as you say. So what do you think — with J. winning the Tony the same year that Alex Newell wins a Tony — can be the impact of two gender nonconforming performers who are not only winning awards, but drawing audiences? What do you think is going to be the impact of having performers like that, who artists know they can create something for, and that there is an audience that will see it?

LÓPEZ: I think it just absolutely opens up what’s possible in musical theater. It opens up what’s possible in commercial theater. It’s amazing that we were able to squeeze as much juice as we did out of the straight white cis storylines. All due respect, they squeezed a lot of juice out of that berry, got a lot out of it. But what is possible when you sort of break apart that paradigm, when you start to disassemble it? I don’t know what’s possible. That’s the thing — nobody knows what’s possible, and that’s what’s so exciting. All I know is that it opens the door. When you have opportunities for performers who don’t resemble those who have come before, then you open the door for writers to create different kinds of roles, which means that you then create different kinds of shows, who the hell knows what’s possible? And in turn, perhaps you also have different kinds of audiences.

So one of the big challenges that everybody worries about with theater is that the audiences are getting older, but the artists are getting younger. And the answer really is, how do you get younger audiences in there? You make things that they want to see. The concern with Some Like It Hot was always not the things that we were doing to change it — it was, will the oldness of the title hamper us? Will young people want to come see this? Will new audiences come to it because it is a movie that their grandparents love, but maybe that they don’t know. Alex and J. single-handedly rewrote the rules of what’s possible this past year, and it’s just the beginning.

MW: I see you’re from Panama City, Florida, and you grew up in Florida, you’re educated in Florida. I’ve been to Panama City and it was beautiful, but I had a guy on a Confederate flag beach towel lying on the beach next to me. So I have an idea of where I was. What was it like for you growing up there?

LÓPEZ: Not great. I should start by saying I was very fortunate that I was raised by loving, supportive parents, who were from Brooklyn. That made all the difference. And I found a community in community theater. I had a little microcosm of tolerance and love and respect in the world that I grew up in.

I happened to be very fortunate that I was raised in a church that was very loving and supportive and inclusive. So I had about as good an experience as any young queer Puerto Rican kid growing up in Panama City could possibly have. But it didn’t protect me from still being in the world there. And it wasn’t great. I’m glad I had the childhood I had because it’s turned me into the grownup that I am. But I wish my life at times hadn’t been as hard as it was. It didn’t need to be that hard. It pains me now that there are kids in Florida who may even have it worse than I did, which is unfathomable to me. Unfathomable.

MW: Well, I always want to uplift gay youth because people forget about them. So thank you for that. And one last question, can you see a sequel future for Henry and Alex, or for yourself?

LÓPEZ: Yeah, absolutely! I love that people are so excited for the movie and in love with the characters that they want more. If Casey has an idea, if Casey and I can come up with an idea together, if Taylor and Nick want to do one, if the audience is there for it, yeah. But before that happens, the writers and the actors need the studios to actually bother to negotiate in good faith for a fair deal. Before we can talk about a sequel, we need to talk about a contract.

Red, White & Royal Blue is available for streaming on Prime Video. Visit www.amazon.com.

Some Like It Hot is playing on Broadway at the Shubert Theatre, 225 West 44th St. in New York City. Tickets are $58 to $278. Visit www.somelikeithotmusical.com.