Sarah Shahi (‘Red, White and Royal Blue’) on playing a ‘T-Rex in heels’ who keeps the president’s son in line [Exclusive Video Interview]
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For actress Sarah Shahi, the character of Zahra Bankston in Casey McQuiston‘s novel “Red, White and Royal Blue” “was one of my favorites, everything from just her energy to those great sarcastic one-liners that she had. I mean, I always sort of pictured her as a T-Rex in heels.” That book was turned into an Amazon Prime Video film by writers Matthew López and Ted Malawer, with López also directing, and they “just did a brilliant job of adapting it.” Watch our exclusive video interview with Shahi above.
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“Red, White and Royal Blue” is an enemies-turned-lovers romantic comedy about a secret affair between Alex Claremont-Diaz (Taylor Zakhar Perez), the son of the US president, and Prince Henry (Nicholas Galitzine), the son of the British king. Zahra is the White House deputy chief of staff who has to keep Alex in line and prevent him from causing an international incident during an election year. But it was important to Shahi that Zahra wasn’t portrayed as opposing a relationship between the two men. “I still wanted Zara very much to be a proponent of this,” she explains. “She has no problem with the fact that they’re together. It’s just the fact that the timing is really f*cking bad right now, fellas.”
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To Shahi, “the story just felt like a classic rom com from the ’90s, you know, something that we just don’t see very much anymore.” She adds, “I’m a huge lover of all the old Howard Hawks movies and Katharine Hepburn movies and the screwball comedies of the ’30s and ’40s. And when [López] had some of those as his references,” she knew that they were “going to be on the same page with this.” On top of that, to be able to tell a queer love story was important to her.”I love being a part of the movie just for what it is as a standalone film and its beauty,” she says, “but then the message behind it and the audiences that it can reach, it’s like icing on the cake for me, you know?”
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