Who Plays The President In Red, White & Royal Blue?
Amazon's newest romantic comedy "Red, White & Royal Blue," based on the novel of the same name by Casey McQuistion, is a sweet, funny, and sharp portrait of a queer couple overcoming the odds. The odds in question are pretty major: what if a fictional younger Prince of England and a First Son of the United States fell in love and had to navigate that relationship while also balancing the geopolitical bond between their two home countries? With Nicholas Galitzine as Prince Henry and Taylor Zakhar-Perez as the couple in question — Prince Henry and Alex Claremont-Diaz — the film is a delightful romantic comedy with more depth than you'd expect for both the subject and the genre... and it's grounded by a performance by Hollywood icon Uma Thurman.
Yes, she does, as we've seen in the trailer, adopt a pretty ridiculous Texas accent for the role — but Thurman's character, President Ellen Claremont, is supposed to be a Texan through and through, boasting the nickname "the Lometa Longshot" before she managed to win her first national election. During the movie's narrative, she's running for re-election and faces a prejudiced Republican opponent, and despite the pressures of her office, she's an incredibly supportive parent to her son as he discovers his sexual identity. So where have you seen Thurman before? Her career spans decades — here are some of her highlights.
Thurman got her start in Hollywood in the late 1980s
After starting out as a teenage fashion model, Thurman's film career took off in the late 1980s when she snagged a starring role in "Johnny Be Good" alongside Anthony Michael Hall before taking on much more adult material in "Dangerous Liaisons" with Glenn Close and John Malkovich. (If you're planning an Uma Thurman movie night, be warned that "Dangerous Liaisons" is really quite dark.)
Thurman then kicked off the 1990s with three pretty major leading roles: "Where the Heart Is," "Henry & June," and "Robin Hood," with the first two arriving in 1990s and the last in 1991. In "Where the Heart Is," Thurman played Daphne, one of three hapless McBain siblings whose father (Dabney Coleman) cuts off so that they can learn to live without his wealth. "Henry & June," adapted from an Anaïs Nin novel about Henry Miller and his wife June, cast Thurman as June alongside Fred Ward as Henry — and it's notable for being the first movie to ever receive an NC-17 rating from the MPAA. Thurman then played Maid Marian in 1991's "Robin Hood" with Patrick Bergin as the titular Robin Hood... but don't confuse it with Kevin Costner's "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves."
Quentin Tarantino made several movies with Uma Thurman
There's no question, though, that Thurman is best known for her two major collaborations with director Quentin Tarantino. Thurman first showed up in Tarantino's universally acclaimed 1994 masterpiece "Pulp Fiction," where she shares her scenes primarily with John Travolta's Vincent Vega, who is tasked with taking Mia Wallace (Thurman) out on the town at the behest of her dangerous and powerful husband Marsellus Wallace (Ving Rhames, who shows up later in the film in a... compromising position). Unfortunately for Vincent, Mia steals drugs from his coat and ends up overdosing... and he risks everything to save her life in once of the most harrowing scenes in "Pulp Fiction," which is definitely saying something.
Later, Tarantino and Thurman worked together to create the character of Beatrix Kiddo, known as both "The Bride" and "Black Mamba" at different points throughout both "Kill Bill" films. Released in two volumes, the kung-fu homage and revenge epic sees Thurman go after the group of assassins who shot her and left her for dead while she was pregnant with Bill's (David Carradine) baby, simply because she tried to leave her life as a violent hitwoman behind. The two films watch as Thurman's Beatrix goes on a bloody rampage, murdering her way to Bill and her daughter, who's still alive. The legacy of these films is definitely marred by the fact that Thurman found herself in actual danger during filming, but still, there's no denying that "The Bride" is Thurman's most iconic role to date.
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Uma Thurman has been in a wide variety of films — to varying degrees of success
Let's get this out of the way: Uma Thurman was in 1997's "Batman & Robin," easily one of the most maligned "Batman" films in the entire canon. With George Clooney in the lead role, benippled Batsuit and all, Thurman played villain Poison Ivy, who fought alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger's Mr. Freeze. To say "Batman & Robin" was poorly received is... an understatement.
Beyond that, Thurman's non-Tarantino films definitely received mixed reviews. For a while, she led a string of flops; in 2005 alone, she appeared in the largely disliked "Be Cool," the underwhelming film adaptation of "The Producers" that same year, and the decidedly odd romantic comedy "Prime" (alongside Meryl Streep in a rare misstep for the legendary actress). The following year, she tried her hand at a superhero comedy with "My Super Ex-Girlfriend" with Luke Wilson, which also performed poorly. After doing some franchise work in 2010 with "Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief" as Medusa, she appeared in a very different project — Lars von Trier's controversial "Nymphomaniac" in 2013. (The less said about her appearance in "Movie 43" that same year, the better.)
Beyond movies, Uma Thurman has only done a handful of television projects
Thurman mostly sticks to movies, but she has appeared in a few major television projects. In the American adaptation of the Australian series "The Slap," which aired in 2015, Thurman played Anouk Latham, childhood friend to Peter Sarsgaard's Hector Apostolou. The series boasted a pretty spectacular cast, which included "Succession" star Brian Cox, Thandiwe Newton, "You" star Penn Badgley (who played Jamie, girlfriend to Thurman's Anouk), and Zachary Quinto as the guy who does the slapping.
Thurman also showed up in a leading role in the short-lived Netflix supernatural series "Chambers," and later starred in the AppleTV+ show "Suspicion." Most recently, you might have seen her play real-life newswoman Arianna Huffington in the inaugural season of Showtime's "Super Pumped," a fictionalized re-telling of the rise and fall of the major executives at the ride-sharing app Uber. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Travis Kalanick, the real-life original CEO of Uber who's eventually booted out of the company after a coup... and as a nice little Easter egg, Thurman's long-time collaborator Quentin Tarantino narrates the series.
You can see Thurman as President Ellen Claremont in "Red, White & Royal Blue" when the film drops on Amazon Prime on August 11, 2023.