Red White and Royal Blue director Matthew Lopez on filming ‘tender’ gay sex scenes
You’re no doubt sick of reading about Barbie and Oppenheimer by now, so we’ve got good news: a new duo of releases are here for you to get excited about. TV series Heartstopper has just dropped its second season on Netflix and so has new Amazon film Red, White & Royal Blue. Unlike Barbenheimer, what connects these two straight-to-streaming releases is their examinations of what young romance looks like today.
“Now we’ve seen Oppenheimer and Barbie, we have no reason to leave the house,” says Matthew Lopez, director of Amazon Original feature Red, White & Royal Blue. “The bad weather in England might do marvels for my movie.”
Lopez, most famously the writer behind landmark play The Inheritance, says the dual release of two of the biggest dramas about young romance was “totally accidental” rather than a move manufactured to create hype. “You know, it’s Amazon and Netflix, they don’t talk. Warner put out Barbie on the same day as Oppenheimer as a fuck you to Nolan. It worked out just fine for both of them.”
Last year the first season of Heartstopper, the LGBTQ teen romance series, ranked within the top ten most watched English language series on Netflix after two days on the platform. The series just missed out on the number one spot on Netflix’s most recent most-watched list, pulling in 6.1 million viewers in its first week.
Into the frenzy falls Red, White & Royal Blue, another romance drama about two men who fall in love. The film, Lopez’s first feature, hopes to cash in on the hype around Heartstopper, providing a chaser LGBTQ drama for fans of the Netflix show. “I’m glad we’re not coming out the same day, that’d be a disaster,” says Lopez. “I know what I’d be watching. Heartstopper, are you kidding me?!”
In The Inheritance, Lopez wrote one of the most lauded pieces of theatre of the 21st century. What The Telegraph called “the play of the century” is a broad-brush look at the AIDS crisis and how it affected one group of men. It spans two three-hour-long sittings. Audiences go to the theatre two nights in a row to see both parts, and many leave feeling both disturbed and validated. The play is viewed in equal prominence as the most famous LGBTQ works of theatre from the 20th century, most notably Angels in America and The Normal Heart.
Bringing The Inheritance back to London? There’s something to be said for letting people miss something. I would love to wait until I have a new perspective to bring it back
Matthew Lopez
Red, White & Royal Blue may surprise fans of Lopez. It is in some ways light and glossy, with a simplistic plot. There are some jokes that are rather on-the-nose and clearly aimed at young adults; in short, the piece isn’t a six-hour trauma puzzle. “People who knew me from The Inheritance were like, ‘that’s surprising,’” he says of the reception to Red, White & Royal Blue. “I said, ‘yeah, maybe,’ but I was ready to make something hopeful, fun, sweet and kind.”
By contrast, The Inheritance is “such a long and painful play, I knew I needed something very different.” Red, White & Royal Blue centres around Alex Claremont-Diaz, a working class Puerto Rican man in his mid-twenties whose father ends up becoming President of the United States. He meets Prince Henry of Wales, a British royal, at a posh party and the two fall into a huge tiered cake together – then, obviously, for each other.
“It was very selfish of me to make this movie, I have to admit,” says Lopez. “I wanted to meet the characters. I read the book longing to have had access to Alex when I was younger. I joked that this is the most expensive piece of fan fiction. I just wanted to live in that world.” Lopez hopes to elicit conversations about queer fantasy, especially with storylines at Kensington Place, and likens the royal and political themes to The Crown and The West Wing.
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He also hopes to move forward on-screen representations of LGBTQ people. “What I love about Alex is he’s also Puerto Rican, and he grew up working class. I’m really eager for well-rounded queer characters who are many things. That, to me, is the next frontier: queer characters who can hold a lot of things in addition to their queerness, as a part of their identity.”
There are some racy sex scenes too, another way Lopez has helped push the envelope for LGBTQ representation. He says including authentic gay sex was integral to the film. “If you don’t want this stuff in the movie, don’t hire me. You can’t tell this story without also telling this story about Henry also having a really robust, fulfilling sex life. They dig each other physically. I was very clear from the beginning that these scenes need to be in the movie.”
“A scene of intimacy is like a song in a musical. If it doesn’t progress the plot then it doesn’t actually belong in the movie. You see Alex losing his same sex virginity. That is a very tender thing for a person. We put a lot of care into filming those scenes.”
Lopez’s Broadway run of The Inheritance was “cruelly” cut short due to the pandemic, but five years after the seminal West End run, would he consider bringing the play back to London? “The second Sonia Friedman says, ‘let’s do it’, I say ‘yes,’” he says. “But there’s something to be said for letting people miss something. You can be over-saturated. If the play isn’t seen again in London for another 20 years that’s okay too.
“The more distance from something, the more opportunity everybody has to grow. If it comes back, which I’m assuming it will one day, I would love for the audience to be in a different place in their lives and see it in a different way. If we bring it back now I’ve got nothing new to add. They don’t need me. I would love to wait until I have a new perspective on the play. I wouldn’t say no of course, but I think there has to be a good reason for it to come back.”
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Lopez lives in Hackney, east London, with his husband and their dog. He was here for a good chunk of his early forties working on The Inheritance during its initial Young Vic run and later at the Noel Coward, where it blossomed into the play it is today. Life in our capital suits him more than life in New York where he spent 20 years. “You can work in New York, you can play in New York but you can’t rest and relax in New York. What I love about London is you can do all those within the same post code.”
Lopez, who has just turned in a script for a yet-to-be-made feature film version of The Bodyguard, and last year wrote a well-received version of Some Like it Hot for Broadway, doesn’t know what his next project is going to be, “although I’d be shocked if this is the last queer project I embark on.”
Only one thing really matters: “The next thing I do is gonna be just as exciting for me as this was. I have to be able to wake up every morning determined to tell the story.”
Red White and Royal Blue is out tomorrow on Amazon Prime