‘Red, White and Royal Blue’ director on why Prince Henry is not on PrEP

Since its release last week, gay rom-com Red, White and Royal Blue has shot to the top of the Amazon Prime streaming charts. It’s an adaptation of the 2019 novel by Casey McQuisto.

The director bringing the tale to the screen is Matthew López, the Tony-award-winning playwright of The Inheritance. It’s his first movie directorial offering, and he’s delighted with its success. He adapted the screenplay with Ted Malawer.

In an interview with Variety, López talked at length about some of the changes he made to the story in transferring it to the screen. He also revealed the amount of preparation that went into the movie’s sex scene.

Red, White and Royal Blue follows the blossoming relationship between Alex Claremont-Diaz (Taylor Zakhar Perez), the First Son of the United States, and Prince Henry (Nicholas Galitzine), third in line to the British throne.

Although it only has one sex scene between the pair, López recognized it was a pivotal part of the story. He was very keen to get it right – even if it controversially earned the movie an R-rating.

He noted that there is a lot more sex in the original novel. However, he felt putting too much into the movie would slow down the storytelling.

“I had to keep it moving. As good-looking as those two young men are, even the most lascivious audience member would eventually get tired of seeing them make love on screen. If we weren’t learning about the characters, then it didn’t belong in the movie.”

Lubricant, condoms and PrEP

López says he and the intimacy coordinator, Robbie Taylor Hunt, discussed every aspect of the scene.

“We talked about, ‘Does the prince douche before they go in? Do we need to tell the audience that? Does the audience just assume that that’s going on?’”

Elsewhere in the movie, Alex’s mother, the President of the US (played by Uma Thurman), mentions her son obtaining Truvada. López thought long and hard whether the Prince would also be on PrEP. Many have spotted condom wrappers in the bedroom scene.

“Robbie and I decided together that the prince is probably not on PrEP, because it would be too dangerous for him to ask for a prescription,” López says. “So the prince absolutely uses condoms. And because we couldn’t really effectively answer the PrEP question narratively, we wanted to also just tell the story that the prince engages in safe sex practices and takes his sexual health seriously.”

He says he and Taylor Hunt even discussed how much lube should be shown in the lube bottle.

“Once we had passed a certain part in the story, I was like, OK, let’s empty out some of the lube,’” López says. “Robbie and I were looking at it, like, ‘How much would they use? Like, well, let’s take it down about this much. OK, that makes sense to me.’”

The resulting scene has prompted comments online as it shows the two men having sex in the missionary position. Apparently, many straight people didn’t know gay guys could do this!

López says he and Taylor Hunt planned every shot of the scene meticulously in advance. They even got into bed together to rehearse it before running through it with the actors.

“We probably overdid it in terms of the preparation for the scene. But we also wanted to make sure that we got on to set and we had an answer for every conceivable question.”

Dropping characters

Elsewhere in the interview, López talks about dropping a couple of characters from the book. This included a gay US senator who acts as a mentor to Alex. Also axed is Alex’s sister, June. López says he decided to amalgamate June and Alex’s best friend, Nora, to create a beefier role for one actress, rather than two characters with scant dialogue each.

“I really didn’t relish the idea of getting on set with two young actresses who are each being given half a meal,” López says. “There’s nothing more unhappy than an actor who doesn’t feel like they’re being well fed by the material, and rightly so.”

Red, White and Royal Blue is on Amazon Prime now.