Red, White and Royal Blue may not feature any of Taylor Swift’s music in the film — but it does feature one of her most stylish outfits.
In the Prime Video rom-com — which premiered on Friday, August 11 — Ellie Bamber’s Princess Beatrice is spotted sporting a light blue embroidered gown by Jenny Packham while attending the wedding of her and Prince Henry’s (Nicholas Galitzine) older brother Philip’s (Thomas Flynn) wedding. Eagle-eyed Swifties, however, noticed the gown is the same one Swift, 33, wears in her 2014 “Blank Space” music video.
“I literally ‘dropped everything now’ and ran to youtube to check if it was the same the second I saw it,” one fan captioned a Saturday, August 12, TikTok featuring clips of the dress in the film and music video.
One user commented that they “RECOGNIZED THAT INSTANTLY” upon watching the movie. Another wrote, “I WAS LIKE blank space dress???”
RWRB follows the enemies-to-lovers romance of Galitzine’s Prince Henry of England and Taylor Zakhar Perez’s Alex Claremont-Diaz, the son of the President of the United States. Princess Beatrice was one of many characters whose role was slightly changed for the film adaptation as she is the middle child of England’s royal siblings in Casey McQuiston’s 2019 novel of the same name.
Earlier this month, director Matthew López exclusively told Us Weekly that “everything that wasn’t Alex and Henry had to go,” as the film’s original run time was three-hours long. “My job as the filmmaker is to deliver Alex and Henry safely on to the end of the film,” he explained. “There’s about less than 20 seconds of the movie in which either one of them doesn’t appear.”
López, 46 — who cowrote the script with Ted Malawer — noted that he was faced with limitations such as “budget, time [and] space” while bringing the source material to life on screen. “What I’ve been saying to people is like, ‘Well, take the number of hours the audiobook lasts and subtract it by two, and that’s what was left out of the movie,’” he joked.
At the end of the day, “When you set for yourself that goal of serving that journey for those two characters, it actually becomes very, very clear what belongs and what doesn’t,” the Tony Award winner told Us.
While some book fans might be disappointed in some of the film’s cuts — including the exclusion of characters such as Alex’s sister, June, Senator Rafael Luna, and Henry’s mother, Princess Catherine — the movie nailed included other pivotal moments such as Alex and Henry’s after-hours date night at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum.
“There’s just something magical about being at a museum after hours, long after all the other patrons have left,” López shared. “To be able to create that beauty between those two characters visually and emotionally was very easy in some ways to do, because we were in the actual space that it was set in the book. And that kind of gave us goosebumps.”
