Casey McQuiston published Red, White and Royal Blue in 2019, watched Prime Video turn it into a hit film in 2023, and is still visibly unused to the apparatus that came with it. Speaking to ELLE at Prime Video's Obsessed Fest, they described the red carpets and the public speaking as something they have not settled into.
Two versions of the same children
The most useful thing they said about adaptation came second hand, from their film agent. The line was that optioning a book is like The Parent Trap: you have twins, and one of them goes off to be raised in London by somebody else.
That has been the experience. The film's Alex and Henry are slightly different people in slightly different circumstances, shaped by what the actors, the director and the editors each brought. The book version and the screen version now live separate lives.
What is coming
Two things, in two different mediums. The film sequel is called Red, White and Royal Wedding and lands before the end of the year. December brings a novella, subtitled The Private Correspondence, which stays with the books.
The novella exists because of the film. Late last year, with the sequel going into production, McQuiston decided the book versions of the characters deserved their own continuation rather than being superseded, and pitched an epistolary idea to their editor. The aim was something detailed and rich enough to carry the story's greatest hits in its own form.
The sequel was never the plan
There was no sequel novel, so a film sequel had not occurred to them. When the first film came out McQuiston was deep in their fourth book, The Pairing, and not thinking about it at all. The reception changed that, and Amazon approached soon afterwards.
They have wanted to extend this world for a long time. When the first book was written they already had a sequel and three spinoffs mapped out in their head, including one made entirely of June Claremont-Diaz's journals, specifically the entries unfit for her memoir, and one telling Rafael Luna's story.
What they keep coming back to is the readers. What they love about fiction, they said, is the relationship people build with characters, the way an audience brings itself to a piece of art and remakes it. Contributing something to that has always been the ambition.