Casey McQuiston Has More Red, White, and Royal Stories to Tell
10 min readIn a small, windowless room somewhere above the ground-floor chaos of Prime Video’s inaugural Obsessed Fest this weekend, Casey McQuiston sipped from a champagne-sized bottle of Saratoga Spring Water and took a deep, steeling breath. Even now, McQuiston is not exactly used to this—the red carpets, the public speaking, the fan fervor—even if it is now, increasingly, the norm.
McQuiston’s life has changed dramatically in the years since they first published their 2019 queer romance novel Red, White, and Royal Blue, which was adapted into a hit Prime Video film in 2023. The project starred Nicholas Galitzine and Taylor Zakhar Perez as soulmates from separate worlds: Galitzine as Prince Henry, a royal third in line for the British throne, and Perez as Alex Claremont-Diaz, the first son of the United States. McQuiston’s book had already become a bestseller during the pandemic, but the attention around the author jumped to new heights as the Red, White, and Royal Blue adaptation became one of Prime Video’s “top three most-watched romantic comedy [films] of all time” in 2023, resulting in what the streamer called “a huge surge of new Prime membership signups directly correlated to the film’s release.”
Three years later, McQuiston is doing their part to keep that momentum going. They’re hard at work extending the RWaRB universe, first with a film sequel—Red, White, and Royal Wedding, out later this year—and a spinoff novella, Red, White, and Royal Blue: The Private Correspondence, out in December. With another wave of RWaRB content comes another spike of fan attention, something Prime Video was keen to encourage during Obsessed Fest, held at Nya Studios in Los Angeles on Saturday. McQuiston appeared before crowds of fans during multiple Obsessed Fest events, teasing the film sequel and reading excerpts from both Red, White, and Royal Blue and the forthcoming novella. Midway through the afternoon, McQuiston remained energized and eager, despite the whirlwind of attention.
“What I love about fiction, with books and with film, is the relationships that people have with characters, and the way that we bring ourselves to a piece of art and then transmute it in a million different ways and make it our own,” McQuiston told ELLE during a sit-down interview. “And it’s always been my dream to contribute something to the world that people could make their own. To watch fans take it on and make fan works and talk about these characters and have all of these deep emotions that I also have about these characters…I mean, it’s kind of hard to describe how rewarding that is as a creative person.”
Below, McQuiston explains the thought process behind their new novella; the collaboration that informed Red, White, and Royal Wedding; and what fans can expect in Alex and Henry’s future.
What has it been like for you, as an author, to let these characters belong to people other than yourself? Fans have developed their own relationships with them, and they exist in the film universe in a manner perhaps different than how you imagined them yourself. What is that like to experience, as their creator?
It’s such a trip. The first time I ever talked to my film agent about optioning my book, she gave me this line that I think is so perfect: She was like, “This is going to be like The Parent Trap, where you have two twin children. One of them is going to go be raised in London by Natasha Richardson. They’re going to be your kid and you’re going to love them, but you’re going to watch them grow up from afar. They’re going to have a life of their own, and you just have to accept that.”
I think that has been my experience [with the film version of Red, White, and Royal Blue]. It does have a life of its own. The characters in the film are slightly different versions; they have slightly different circumstances. The actors have a vision, and the director has a vision, and the editors have their vision, and so there’s so much transformation that happens. Even if I feel like it’s a super faithful adaptation, which I do, it’s still always going to be different.
Tell me about this novella. I’m curious about why this idea felt right in terms of a second installment, as opposed to a more traditional sequel novel.
When I first wrote Red, White, and Royal Blue, in my head I had a sequel and three spinoffs already planned out. I wanted to write one that was just June [Claremont-Diaz, Alex’s sister]’s journals, but all of the ones that weren’t fit to print in her memoir. I wanted to do one that was Rafael Luna’s story. There were so many I wanted to do, but what I kept coming back to was how much I wanted to write an epistolary story with Alex and Henry. The thing that I know resonated with a lot of readers, but also that meant the most to me, were the letters that they exchanged in the book. My favorite chapter of the book is the one that’s just their emails.
Late last year, as we were getting into production on the sequel [film], I was like, “I really want to give book Alex and Henry their time, too. I want both [versions] to get to live on.” So I pitched this epistolary idea to my editor. I wanted it to be detailed and rich enough to give all of the greatest hits of what’s going to happen for the next 20 years of Alex and Henry’s life, but also leave room for if I ever wanted to do a full sequel. I wanted it to come out around the time of the film so that we would have, like, all of our kids fed.
You mentioned that you would still like to leave yourself room to write a sequel novel. So when was the seed for a film sequel first planted?
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