A celebrated, award-winning gay playwright, Matthew Lopez  now tackles movies, adapting and directing Friday’s gay rom com “Red, White & Royal Blue.”

Streaming on Prime Video, “RWRB” spotlights a romance between the UK’s closeted Prince Henry (Nicholas Galitzine), fourth in line for the throne, and Alex Claremont-Diaz (Taylor Zakhar Perez)  First Son of America’s first female president (Uma Thurman).

“Very early in life I had access to theater. So theater was where I started,” Lopez, 46, said in a Zoom interview of his landmark 2-part gay epic “The Inheritance” which won him a raft of awards including the Tony, Olivier and Evening Standard’s Best Play.  “But I always knew I wanted to make films and that when the time was right, I would.”

What convinced him Casey McQuiston’s bestselling novel was the right vehicle was the character of Alex whose father is Mexican and mother white.

Alex, Lopez said, “was drawn hopefully, positively and sympathetically. That was a really big draw for me. I wanted something very compelling about making a film with a lead character like Alex. Secondarily was the relationship between Alex and Henry. There was something deeply compelling about the two of them in their story, in their situation. They’re two people trapped by circumstances.

“On the one hand, you think, ‘Well, why would I ever have any sympathy for people who have such access to power?’ Yes, Henry’s privileged. Alex started out his life in a working class. These two characters didn’t realize that actually they have no power — until they decide to speak as themselves.”

Casting the two leads Lopez called, “An incredibly exhausting process. I wanted to see as many young actors as possible and was heartened to discover there were a lot out there.”

While there’s a push that actors should be restricted with actual disabled actors playing disabled characters and only queer actors as queer characters, Lopez cheerily noted, “It’s true that it’s against the law to ask actors about their sexuality.

“So I left it up to do what’s most important to me: Finding the right souls to inhabit these characters. I didn’t know until after we hired him that Nick was actually royalty himself” — a descendent of Russia’s venerable House of Golitsyn.

“It was important to find great actors. It was just hilarious that I actually ended up finding a great actor who is a royal.”

As for his next project, how queer will Lopez’s update of “The Bodyguard” be?

“That goes into the writers’ strike,” he pointed out, an off-limits subject until it’s settled.