Red, White & Royal Blue Director Talks Alex and Henry’s R-Rated Love Scene — Plus, Grade the Movie!
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Warning: The following contains spoilers. Proceed at your own risk!
There’s no shying away from the intimacy of love in Red, White & Royal Blue.
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Now streaming on Prime Video, the movie adaptation of Casey McQuiston’s bestselling novel follows the enemies-to-lovers story of Prince Henry of Wales (played by Purple Hearts’ Nicholas Galitzine) and Alex Claremont-Diaz (The Kissing Booth 2′s Taylor Zakhar Perez), who is the son of the first female president (Uma Thurman). After a cake topples on the two men during a royal wedding, the First Son and the prince are forced to pretend to be friends to save face in the media. But as they get to know each other and details are revealed about why they initially got off on the wrong foot, a real connection and flirtation grows between Alex and Henry that develops into a secret relationship.
What starts off as casual hookups soon turns serious as Henry declares that he and Alex should make love. While Alex has experimented with men in the past, he’s never been fully intimate with one, and his insecurities are touchingly on display as Henry reassures him that he’s in good hands (because he went to an all-boys boarding school).
For the ensuing sex scene, director/co-writer Matthew López and the actors worked with intimacy coordinator Robbie Taylor Hunt to make sure the moment serviced the story.
“We talked a lot about what the purpose of this scene would be in the movie,” López tells TVLine, adding that his mandate for the entire movie was that if a scene “doesn’t teach anything about Alex and Henry, it doesn’t belong in the film.”
“You had an opportunity with this scene to really learn a lot about these characters through the way they approach the sex scene together, the way they approach this intimacy,” López continues. “For Alex, this is the first time he’s having sex with a man, and for Henry, Nick and I decided together that this was the first time that Henry was ever having sex with someone he had feelings for. And so, for the two of them, it’s a very important, life-changing night.”
When it came time to shoot the sequence, López decided that it was going to take place “for the most part, once they get onto the bed,” and that it would be “shot pretty tightly” with close-ups on the actors’ faces and their entwined hands.
“It wasn’t because I was sort of afraid of showing things or that I couldn’t show things,” he explains. “There is nothing that I could show an audience that they can’t find themselves on the Internet. What they can’t see on the Internet are two actors performing a scene about intimacy. And so, as we were putting it together, that really just became another part of the storytelling devices.”
Henry and Alex’s incredibly vulnerable love scene, which is a pivotal turning point in their deepening romantic relationship, did earn the movie an R rating — not that López has any regrets about it.
“When we got the R rating, we were a little surprised, but we also weren’t surprised,” López shares. “It came with a set of notes from the MPAA as to what we could do in order to get a PG-13 rating, and of course, it all had to do with that scene.”
Even with the MPAA’s suggestions, “there was no real conversation” about tweaking the moment, López says adamantly. “We just decided, no, we’re not going to make any changes… and we’re keeping the R rating.”
As a fan of McQuiston’s book (“I fell madly in love with it, and I pursued the [movie],” López enthuses), it was another memorable Henry/Alex interaction that López was most excited to translate from the page to screen. In the tender exchange, Henry takes Alex to the Victoria and Albert Museum in the middle of the night, opening up about his past and his fears, and the couple shares a slow dance amongst the statues.
“It’s the only scene in the movie that is actually filmed at the actual location where it’s set. We got into the [museum] at about 9:30 on a Friday night, and we filmed there until about 5 o’clock in the morning, and it was beautiful to be there alone at night with just Taylor and Nick,” López shares. “That, for me, was the scene I was most excited to film because it had the potential, I knew, to just be very romantic and very beautiful.”
Red, White & Royal Blue viewers, what did you think of the movie? Grade it below, then hit the comments!
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