Transcontinental, same-sex romance wraps itself in “Red, White & Royal Blue”

Fifty pages into the 2019 book “Red, White & Royal Blue,” playwright/screenwriter Matthew López knew he wanted to bring the tale of transcontinental romance between the son of the U.S. president and an English prince to the big screen.

“It was about page 50 that I knew I wanted to make this movie,” said the Tony Award winner during a recent interview. “I fell madly in love with it.”

Amazon Prime already had plans for the movie, and López was “one of the last ones to join the project.” He adapted the book by Casey McQuiston for the movie he also directed.

The 2-hour rom-com, which premieres on Amazon Prime on Aug. 12, follows the budding but complicated romance between Alex Claremont-Díaz, the son of the U.S.’s first female president, and Prince Henry of Great Britain.

Love does get royally complicated as the movie opens up with Claremont-Díaz (Taylor Zakhar Pérez) not too happy about attending a royal wedding where Prince Henry’s older brother ties the knot. The American all-too-happily paints the prince (Nicholas Galitzine) as snobby based on an earlier encounter.

The evening goes downhill after the two get into a heated argument, knock down a skyscraper of a wedding cake on themselves and immediately get buried in an avalanche of frosting and cake.

While the media has a field day with Cakegate, Claremont-Díaz flies home to deal with his mom (Uma Thurman). The president is facing a tough re-election and can’t have such a scandal sink her campaign, so she directs her son to patch things up.

Political scion and the prince grudgingly pose for the cameras and downplay the wedding day spat, but they start a friendship that blossoms into much more than that and creates another headache when a British tabloid gets its hands on steamy text messages between the two lovers.

López, who won a Tony for his 2019 play “The Inheritance,” jumped at the chance to direct the movie.

“It didn’t take long for me to know that this was going to be a movie, and that I wanted to make it,” said López, who grew up in Florida the son of schoolteachers.

Why a movie and not a play?

“You can’t beat the locations! Buckingham Palace, the Oval Office, the White House, and all those great locations,” said López. “It really, really wanted to be a movie.

“And I really wanted to shoot in all of those beautiful locations.”

López doesn’t see much difference between directing a play and a movie.

“I got to take a lot of the things I learned as a playwright about storytelling and apply it to this movie,” he said. “There’s a lot of overlap between the two disciplines.”

But, he admits to having to “learn quickly” about making a movie.

A major challenge was finding the right actors for the leading roles.

“We spent about five months casting this film and looking at hundreds and hundreds of actors for these parts,” said López.

When López first met Chicago native Zakhar Pérez and British actor Galitzine, “they both really, really stood out very quickly as real possibilities.”

That chemistry sparked when the two met via Zoom for a script reading. “It took a long time to find them, but it was very obvious that they were our guys.”

In the end, love trumps a foreign altercation. Will there be a sequel?

“If the movie is well received and there is demand for it, and if Taylor and Nick want to do one, I’ll be happy to do a sequel,” said López.

At a glance

“Red, White & Royal Blue”

Director: Matthew López

Screenplay: Matthew López and Ted Malawer

Cast: Taylor Zakhar Pérez, Nicholas Galitzine, Clifton Collins Jr., Stephen Fry, Uma Thurman, Sarah Shahi, Malcolm Atobrah

Time: 1 hour, 58 minutes

Rated: R