Why Does ‘Red, White and Royal Blue’ Have a King Instead of a Queen? Director Matthew Lopez Explains

usmagazine.com:

Changes are made in every book-to-movie adaptation, and Red, White and Royal Blue is no different. However, director Matthew López was thinking about future generations of viewers when he made one change — swapping a queen for a king.“Well, there were two reasons.

One, I was trying to really differentiate as much as possible our fictional royal family from the actual royal family,” López, who cowrote the film with Ted Malawer, exclusively told Us Weekly.Amazon Studios’ Red, White and Royal Blue tells the enemies-to-lovers story of the British Prince Henry (Nicholas Galitzine) and Alex Claremont-Diaz (Taylor Zakhar Perez), the son of the first female President of the United States (Uma Thurman).

The fictional British royal family is steeped in tradition and King James III (Stephen Fry) makes it clear that he wants Henry to stay in the closet. Casey McQuiston‘s best-selling novel depicted similar circumstances — but with a character called Queen Mary.López realized early on that he wanted to make the change, revealing they cast the role in fall 2021, one year before Queen Elizabeth II died at age 96. “While Her Majesty was still alive at the time, I also knew that for most of the life of this film, most people will access it while there is a King of England,” the director told Us. “Between King Charles, Prince William, Prince George — for most of our lifetime, there will always be King of England.

And so, I wanted to sort of make sure that the film in some ways made sense to people for a hundred years.”There was one more very simple — and understandable — reason he had to trade the queen for a king. “I had a chance to get Stephen Fry in, and I just couldn’t turn that down.