López also gravitated towards a light-hearted, feature-length project after years spent in the thick of The Inheritance, a seven-hour play often called a spiritual successor to Angels in America. “If not outright strategy to it, there was definitely, I think, clear preference to take on something that wasn’t going to cost me the same as The Inheritance. The Inheritance took a big, big chunk out of me, and I was happy to make that sacrifice,” the playwright says. “I knew, though, that I needed to work on a story after The Inheritance that was going to—not be less challenging, because certainly this hasn’t been in any way less challenging, but that would leave me in a different mood at the end of every day.”
The film is undeniably modern (“We are in a hotel crawling with reporters. If anyone sees you leave this hotel, I will Brexit your head from your body,” Sarah Shahi’s chief of staff warns in the trailer), but López turned to romantic comedies of the past as inspiration: screwball affairs from the ’30s and ’40s like Bringing Up Baby and Sullivan’s Travels, as well as more recent hits like When Harry Met Sally or Moonstruck. All of those films revolve around “very smart, very clever people who often find themselves in over their heads, and the only way to really get themselves out of trouble is to talk their way out,” he explains.
Courtesy of Jonathan Prime/Prime.
Then there was the matter of finding his leads, roles that have been fancast since the book’s 2019 release. For Henry, a man born to privilege and often spiteful of that fact, López sought someone who would “protect” the character. “Without realizing it, Nick taught me that I was in search of someone who would take care of Henry,” he says. “It felt very safe putting Henry into Nick’s hands.” As for Alex, the rowdier of the two, it was about casting an actor who could “transform himself” over the film’s two-hour run time. “Taylor’s a little more like Alex than Nick is like Henry. But Taylor is not as much of a human cannonball as Alex is,” López says. “And to watch Taylor in the audition process become that reckless and energetic creature was actually really, really fun.” Now, he says, “I genuinely cannot imagine any other two actors other than these two playing these parts.”
Like Alex and Henry, López had to straddle the two high-powered worlds of a US presidency (embodied by Uma Thurman) and British monarchy (that would be Stephen Fry). Luckily, he’s had some experience with foreign affairs. “I’d seen every episode of The West Wing,” says López, who was also a writer on Aaron Sorkin’s HBO series The Newsroom. “I’d seen every movie that was ever set inside the Oval Office. And I’d been living in the UK for a while, so I had a slightly-better-than-an-outsider’s understanding of British culture.”