Red, White & Royal Blue’s Iconic Cake Scene Explained

Red, White & Royal Blue’s iconic cake scene just got an explainer from director Matthew López. The filmmaker sat down with What To Watch before the strikes and broke down how the entire stunt went down. Fans of the novel will remember Alex and Henry’s inciting incident where a massive wedding cake meets an untimely demise. López explained how they assembled that gargantuan fake dessert and how much of it ended up being real. Red, White & Royal Blue fans have been waiting to see Alex and Henry’s romance on-screen for a while. You can’t really have it without the big cake debacle between Taylor Zachary Perez and Nicholas Galitzine.

“We hedged our bets a bit! For the most part it was a styrofoam cake, it was a squishy polystyrene I think, which had a latex coating on it,” López began. “It was so lightweight that actually my production designer lay down on the floor and had her team drop it on her head just to show us that it was safe! For a lot of what you see in the movie we got away with using a very durable, indestructible cake, and a lot of the aftermath of the cake disaster was also not real cake, because one of the things that was really important to us was to make sure that we didn’t waste food needlessly, so most of the cake in that whole thing is not real cake.

“The real cake was saved for when we had to just like throw it in their faces, and we did it once. The shot of the cake landing in their faces, we got once, we got lucky, it landed perfectly where we wanted it to be,” he continued. “It was actually me and my production designer throwing cake in Taylor and Nick’s faces, which was very cathartic for me after a few weeks of filming!”

Red, White & Royal Blue Is A Labor of Love

Back in 2019, Red, White & Royal Blue rocketed up the New York Times Bestseller list. If you browse your local bookstore or the Amazon charts, it’s still a strong performer. López knew that and counts himself among the fandom. Glamour caught up with the film’s cast and crew long before the Writers’ Strike and Actors’ Strike to talk about how important representation can be in stories like this one.

“I never imagined I’d read a book with a queer Latine character at the center—a character who is smart and passionate and flawed and hopeful,” López said. “I think having this book in my life when I was younger might have made it a little easier. I knew immediately that I wanted to bring it to the screen.”

He would add, “We were all aware that we wanted to make one a classic rom-com but with a sort of new spin. Matthew’s a very sensitive, very feeling person, and we obviously wanted to inject our movie with that kind of emotionality. He had a great balance in being able to facilitate both lightness and emotion within his work.”

What Is Red, White & Royal Blue About?

In Red, White, & Royal Blue, 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) have a lot in common: stunning good looks, undeniable charisma, international popularity…and a total disdain for each other. Separated by an ocean, their long-running feud hasn’t really been an issue, until a disastrous—and very public—altercation at a royal event becomes tabloid fodder driving a potential wedge in U.S./British relations at the worst possible time. Going into damage control mode, their powerful families and respective handlers force the two rivals into a staged “truce.” But as Alex and Henry’s icy relationship unexpectedly begins to thaw into a tentative friendship, the friction that existed between them sparks something deeper than they ever expected.

Based on Casey McQuiston’s critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller, Red, White & Royal Blue marks the feature film writing and directing debut of Tony Award-winning playwright Matthew López (The Inheritance).

Will you be watching Red, White & Royal Blue this weekend? Let us know down in the comments!