Stephen Fry was pleased by his’subversive’ casting in the LGBTQ+ rom-com for Prime Video, according to Red, White & Royal Blue director Matthew López.
The 65-year-old actor and comedian has long been a popular out homosexual character, but he was cast somewhat against type in the film version of Casey McQuiston’s blockbuster novel.
In the film, Fry portrays King James III, the grandfather of Prince Henry (Nicholas Galitzine), in a gender-reversal from the book, where Queen Mary is the reigning king.
He is unimpressed by his grandson’s blossoming affair with Alex Claremont-Diaz (Taylor Zakhar Perez), the First Son of the United States.
Explaining how the idea of casting the Blackadder and Wilde star came about, López said: ‘If you are casting a fictional heterosexual homophobic bully of a monarch, you first go to Stephen Fry! Because it’s cheeky – and he knew he was cheeky – and he came in and he did such beautiful work.’
The director and writer also revealed that he felt Fry ‘took a lot of delicious pleasure in playing that role’.
‘We all knew, and Stephen knew it most especially, that there was something potentially subversive about that, and he played it to the hilt. We had so much fun together.’
The Royal Family characters certainly share superficial similarities with the current British monarchy, including names such as Henry, Catherine, Philip and Beatrice.
López, 46, noted that his ‘ignorance’ as a non-Brit keeps him from being too concerned about sharing the film with a UK audience, and that he wants to distinguish between reality and the ‘dream’ of Red, White, and Royal Blue.
‘I have the brash ignorance of an American on my side that I will use to my advantage! I think it’s very clear to anyone who sees the movie that this is not the Mountbatten-Windsors – even to the degree that I decided to change the family name in the film to Hanover-Stuart [in the book it’s Mountchristen-Windsor]; I just wanted to emphasise that.
‘I also think that if people are watching this movie, and they’re thinking about the Windsors, we’ve sort of ruined the magic for them. This is about fantasy, it’s about escapism, and we needed to maintain that throughout the film.
‘So no, I’m not nervous because I don’t have enough experience to know what to be nervous about – ignorance is bliss, I say!’
Speaking of cinematic magic, Red, White, and Royal Blue presents its viewers with a picture of a world in which America has its first female President, played in the film by Kill Bill actress Uma Thurman (a ‘f**king legend,’ according to López).
Fortunately, the part of the drawling Texan democrat was not difficult to sell to Thurman; director and co-writer López claimed that after reading both the novel and the script, she knew Ellen “even better than I did.”
‘She came on set and she taught me a lot about her, I think she probably taught MCLTeam Casey a lot about her too. It was a lucky break getting her.’
López also said that the 53-year-old Hollywood actress passed his own key exam for Ellen with flying colours.
‘The first criteria I had when we put together the list for Ellen was, would you vote for her? And Uma Thurman, at the risk of losing her – to acting – if she decided to get into politics, I would vote for her.’
López is an award-winning playwright in his own right, with one of his most recent works, The Inheritance, receiving accolades and awards from 2018 to 2020, including Oliviers, Tonys, Drama Desk Awards, and Critics’ Circle Theatre Awards on both sides of the Atlantic.
He was also nominated for a Tony Award earlier this year for co-writing the script for the new Broadway musical adaption of Some Like It Hot.
López is making both his directorial debut and his first movie with Red, White & Royal Blue, which he is candid about not necessarily being ‘the thing I assumed would be my first film’.
‘That said, I read the book and I fell madly in love with it, and I had this very strong urge to make the movie. You read things and you think, “Oh, it’s a seven on the urgency scale. Oh, that’s a four” – hopefully you don’t end up making the fours! And this was a 10.’
He also said that if someone else had made the film Red, White, and Royal Blue, he would “cry myself to sleep for a year.”
López was the project’s main pursuer, asserting his claim and “truly making it be known that this was my – and it worked!”
For him, representation in the film was very vital, especially in an industry that has made sluggish progress with LGBTQ+ themed tales, and saw last year’s Bros (the first gay rom-com from a major studio) flop.
‘I had never read a character like Alex Claremont-Diaz before in a book. I’m a gay Latino in his 40s and I think if I had read Alex when I was in my 20s… I wish I’d had access to a character such as him when I was younger,’ he shared. ‘It might not have made my life all that materially easier, but it might have made it just a little bit easier – and that would have been nice.’
Although he’s a fan of Henry and all the other ‘wonderful’ characters in the book, López knows it all began for him with Alex ‘because I could relate to him and I wanted to be the person who helped bring that character into the world’.
‘And then the bonus is that you also get to bring Henry into the world. He was a character about as far from me as you could possibly imagine – and my instinct with Henry was always that he needs someone to take care of him, and I need to do that. I needed to be his caretaker – until I met Nick [Galitzine ] and I could hand him over to Nick to take care of him,’ he added.
Since its first release in 2019, the novel Red, White, and Royal Blue has been enormously successful, thanks in large part to becoming a TikTok sensation and one of ‘BookTok’s’ (the literature enthusiasts’ term for their group on the site) most popular suggestions.
Surprisingly, López was unaware of BookTok until he was deep into post-production on the film – his social media presence is restricted to Instagram “to look at images of puppies and videos of people doing silly things,” as well as to remind people that he’s “alive and producing stuff.”
‘I didn’t know about BookTok until well into the editing process of this movie, when someone very casually mentioned it to me and I’m like, “Oh, what’s that?”’
However, he is relieved that everything was for the best, since it prevented any more stress.
‘I think if I allowed myself to understand just how popular the book was it might have frozen me in my tracks. I think I actually needed to have some sort of blissful ignorance over how many people in the world love this book. If you’re on the tightrope, you shouldn’t look down,’ he mused.
‘I had enough to deal with, making my first movie. I wasn’t going to look up BookTok… but I hope they look at us!’
Red, White & Royal Blue will premiere globally on Friday August 11, exclusively on Prime Video.
Source My Celebrity Life.
