How ‘Red, White and Royal Blue’ Walked the Emotional and Physical Tightrope for Pivotal Sex Scene (Exclusive)

Warning: The following contains spoilers about the Red, White and Royal Blue movie.

Red, White and Royal Blue has been a highly-anticipated theatrical event for months. Fans who read Casey McQuiston's debut novel about the first son of the United States falling in love with the second prince of England have been patiently waiting to see how Alex Claremont Diaz and Prince Henry's love story plays out.

The book is adored not only because of McQuiston's clever writing but because it is an unabashedly queer pride love story. The movie was tasked with carrying that same spirit and depicting Henry and Alex's adult romance without sanitizing it to make it more palatable for more conservative viewers. The litmus test for whether the film adaptation pulled that off is the first time Alex and Henry have sex.

The love scene arrives about halfway through the movie after Henry and Alex have started fooling around but before they're willing to admit any real feelings for each other. Their attraction to each other is evident from the film's opening scene, but their first time changes the relationship from casual hooking up to a deeper emotional connection. It symbolizes both men realizing they're falling in love, even if they aren't ready to say it aloud.

It's also a crucial scene for representation. Red, White and Royal Blue is a celebratory love story between two men, and depicting them in an intimate situation requires the same level of reverence for the movie to feel true to the spirit of the book.

The film's co-screenwriter and director Matthew Lopez told The Messenger how portraying the emotional weight of the scene without shying away from Alex and Henry's physical actions was the tightrope he and his team had to walk. It required strong collaboration between himself, intimacy coordinator Robbie Taylor Hunt, Perez and Galzitine.

"I said, 'I want two things, and they may seem diametrically opposed. Our job is to make these two things fit,'" the director explained. "I want the audience to know implicitly, without any ambiguity, what is happening physically throughout every step of the process, but I also don’t want to have to show it. What is most important to me in this scene is their faces and the emotional journey the characters take."

The camera stays focused on Alex and Henry's faces for most of the scene and seldom goes below the waist. As it's Alex's first time having sex with a man, Henry has to walk him through the initial steps. You see the condoms and lube but not the application of either. Once they get going, the focus is on how they kiss each other, the way they touch each other and hold hands. Soft music and warm lighting fill in the gaps to emphasize how critical this moment is for each character.

"It was most important to me to create a scene of intimacy in which the audience is aware at all times of precisely what is happening inside their minds and in their hearts. It is the body and the heart and the mind working together. That was the challenge I set for us," Lopez said. "We had those boys play that scene having to understand physically what was happening off camera, playing it on their faces and playing the emotions of it and acting the scene rather than simply performing the scene."

Lopez also revealed that he and Hunt studied several intimate scenes to figure out how to block Alex and Henry's first time (if you also felt the Brian-and-Justin Queer as Folk vibes, you weren't alone), but ultimately they wanted to create something that felt unique to this film.

"I know that my intimacy coordinator [Robbie] and I watched a number of scenes of intimacy from various movies I can’t even remember now because there were so many of them," Lopez said. "We basically said, ‘There’s nothing out there we want to steal, nothing we want to copy,’ which is great. We really wanted to do our own thing."

Do you think they pulled it off?

Red, White and Royal Blue is now streaming on Prime Video.