RED, WHITE & ROYAL BLUE
It’s an affair of the heart that involves politics at the highest level when Alex Claremont-Diaz (Taylor Zakhar Perez), the son of the first woman president of the United States (Uma Thurman), and Britain’s Prince Henry (Nicholas Galitzine) become embroiled in an international incident, complicating U.S.-British relations at the worst possible time.
Based on Casey McQuiston’s New York Times best seller, Red, White & Royal Blue follows what happens when President Ellen Claremont sends her son to the U.K. to represent her—despite his long-running feud with the royal heir—with the result that both families have to go into damage control.
“What I love about Uma’s performance is how effortlessly she is at home inside the Oval Office,” says Matthew López, 46, who makes his film directing debut with Red, White & Royal Blue. “You almost forget she’s playing the first female president and is instead simply playing the current president.” He adds, “If people are more inclined to vote for a woman for president because of Uma’s performance, I will have done my civic duty.”
López credits Thurman’s believability as a woman who could break the glass ceiling as the reason he cast the Kill Bill star as the president.
“Our first and last metric when thinking about who should play Ellen was: ‘Would I vote for her?’” he says. “And Uma passed that electoral test for us easily. Throughout her career, she has always exhibited a centered strength and those are qualities one (usually) hopes to find in a president.”
As the movie plays out, Alex and Henry’s forced proximity begins to melt their icy relationship into a tentative friendship, and then the friction that existed between them sparks something deeper than they ever expected—bringing to the fore a new series of issues.
López chose Red, White & Royal Blue to make his film directing debut because, he says, “I read the book and fell madly in love with Alex and Henry as people and as a couple. I couldn’t think of a better way to spend two years of my life than bringing their story to the screen. It was the characters as Casey created them. The rest flowed from there.”