Exclusive Interview

Casey McQuiston Teases Alex & Henry’s Wedding & More in ‘RWRB: The Private Correspondence’

In Casey McQuiston‘s 2019 novel, Red, White & Royal Blue, Alex and Henry’s love story famously starts with a wedding. In the author’s forthcoming sequel novella, The Private Correspondence, the First Son of the United States and Prince of England will finally walk down the aisle themselves.

The Private Correspondence, which is set for a December 1 release, spans roughly 20 years since Alex and Henry’s relationship went public. After their leaked private emails outed them to the world, the couple decided to switch to handwritten love letters. McQuiston’s epistolary novella explores Alex and Henry’s future through the aforementioned letters, postcards, journal entries, and more.

“It was really tough because, obviously, I wanted to kind of cover a lot of the big milestones in their lives,” McQuiston told Swooon at New York Comic Con on October 9. “But also, most of those things are not things that you would be writing letters to each other about. You have to really get creative and figure out why they would be having an important conversation over a letter instead of just in person. I mean, they live together. They share the same bed. They would just talk about it.”

McQuiston’s strategy was to work around the big moments, including what led up to Alex and Henry making a big decision, as well as their processing of it afterward. “To me, that’s also fun because there’s so much attachment that the fans have to these characters, not just to what will happen to them, but what they imagine is going to happen for them,” the author explained. “One thing I didn’t want to do was necessarily take away somebody’s vision of how they wanted that moment to happen.”

One thing McQuiston hopes comes out of The Private Correspondence is fans envisioning or even writing those scenes themselves. “I feel like I put about 17,000 fanfic prompts in there,” they said. “And I hope people go crazy. I will never get to read any of them, but I hope that people have the time of their lives filling in all the blanks.”

One of those scenes? Alex and Henry’s wedding, of course. It’s no spoiler that the couple ties the knot. In a bonus chapter included in the collector’s edition of Red, White & Royal Blue, the author reveals that they’re engaged. McQuiston shared their vision for Alex and Henry’s more distant future on social media, revealing that they’re married and girl dads living in Texas, which will be explored in The Private Correspondence.

“Tiny spoiler, but like, obviously, you can’t show their wedding in a letter,” McQuiston said. “It wouldn’t make sense for them to write a letter, like, ‘I remember at our wedding’ and then describe it moment by moment. A transcript of their wedding video is not very fun to read. But I was able to put in drafts of their vows and them making a list of what wedding flowers they want to choose and why. And so that way, we can kind of be there in that moment with them, but also let them have that moment to themselves.”

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Alex and Henry’s vows were one of the last things McQuiston wrote for the novella. “They were so hard to write,” they confessed. “It felt like such an insane amount of pressure because I was like, this has to be the most romantic thing they’ve ever said to each other. And I was putting way too much pressure on it. And then I kind of took a step back and I was like, actually what I think their vows should be is like a thesis statement of their relationship from each of their points of view.”

They discovered that most people recommend vows remain under 350 words. McQuiston elaborated, “In my head, I think that Alex and Henry probably had a very long and private conversation right before their wedding where they were like, ‘This is everything else I want to say.’ But I do feel like they’re also the type of people that are going to keep it short and sweet because we want to get to the party.”

While working on the novella, McQuiston revealed another major Alex and Henry relationship development to stars Taylor Zakhar Perez and Nicholas Galitzine, who were filming the sequel to the 2023 adaptation at the time. The Private Correspondence will see Alex and Henry start their family via surrogacy. “I did tell Nick and Taylor what what [Alex and Henry’s] kids’ hyphenated last name would be because that was a whole decision I had to make,” the author dished. “Between the two of them, they have five last names, so I had to narrow it down. So, Nick and Taylor know what Alex and Henry’s kids last names are.”

On set, the person McQuiston talked to most was the film’s royal expert, whom they credit in their novella’s acknowledgements. “At some point, I made him come sit in the producers room with me and like, ‘I need to ask you a lot of questions about royal protocol around children and babies because I don’t know how to plot this…'” they said. “‘I don’t know how it works with surrogacy because we’ve never had a gay Prince of England.'”

Readers will have to wait and see when exactly those milestones occur for FirstPrince, but in between those major turning points, McQuiston has interspersed smaller, intimate ones. “[There’s] so much domesticity,” they revealed. “This is something I put in a piece I just recently did for The Cut on the two of them, so I don’t think it’s a spoiler, but Henry gets really into backyard gardening and beekeeping as soon as they move to Texas. And Alex is doing some wood fire pizza oven, like 30s-crisis-type of stuff. They’re really thriving in Texas.”

McQuiston confirmed that older Alex and Henry are definitely still the characters readers got to know when they were younger. “Alex will always be really fiery and passionate and determined and just wildly smart, and Henry is always going to be artistic and sensitive and romantic and all of those things. But I think there’s, for both of them, a bit of a mellowing out, as we all do when we get older,” they noted.

As they’ve matured, Alex has gone to therapy, while Henry’s been working on his creative projects. “They’ve all they both kind of found their own footing in the world outside of the shadows of their families and the expectations that are placed on them by the world, and they’ve kind of just become grown adults who know exactly who they are,” McQuiston explained.

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The author teased that “1/5 of [The Private Correspondence] is horny, 1/5 of it is angsty, and the rest of it is romantic.” A good portion of those romantic moments are realistic, navigating both the ups and downs of life with a partner. “It’s like, ‘I’m helping you through this thing you’re going through,’ and it’s not necessarily a love letter, but it is a romantic letter because there’s the intimacy of going through life together,” they said. “But yeah, they have a couple of arguments that I think people are going to definitely pick sides, but you get to hear them both out. As the one who created them, I think they both have points and they always resolve it in the end.”

Alex and Henry, at the end of the day, are both complicated people with their own baggage and mental health struggles, which The Private Correspondence doesn’t shy away from. “In a long term relationship, stuff is going to come up, you’re going to trigger each other, you’re going to piss each other off,” McQuiston shared. “You’re going to have a crisis because of something else going on in your life and let it affect the way that you are in your relationship and have to make amends for it. That’s just what happens in life and in long term partnership. And to me, it’s very rewarding to watch characters come through that and come out of the other side together.”

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Since they wrote the first book almost a decade ago, the author found tackling The Private Correspondence a bit daunting at first. Especially because, since then, two movie adaptations have been filmed. McQuiston co-wrote Red, White & Royal Wedding‘s script before they’d explored Alex and Henry’s book future. The book and movie characters are different, so McQuiston had to make them distinct in their head.

“I was so nervous about making sure I still knew them and knew how they would grow as they got older,” the author added. “I had to spend a lot of time kind of reacquainting myself with them, and it was so fun. I was making playlists. I was building out their wardrobes and deciding what their fragrances would be. And it was such a delight to get to spend time with them again. And now that I’m in my 30s and they’re in their 30s, we’re all grown-ups together. And I think that I’m really proud of where they ended up.”