Drew Starkey was a day into rehearsals for Luca Guadagnino‘s Queer when he found himself rolling around the floor in a sweaty clinch with Daniel Craig.
“We jumped into it, just grabbing and throwing our bodies on top of one another, rolling around, getting intermingled,” Starkey recalls, “I think it unlocked something subconsciously, gave us a level of comfortability and familiarity with each other, so that, everything after that was very easy.”
What came after was some of the most graphic and intimate scenes Starkey has ever put on screen. Guadagnino’s adaptation of the William S. Burroughs’ novel —written in the early ‘50s but not published until 1985 — sees Craig playing an American expat and heroin addict (Burroughs in lightly-fictionalized form) lolling about Mexico City who becomes obsessed with Eugene (Starkly), a young student whose sexual ambiguity makes him all the more mysterious and desirable. What follows is a tortured story of unrequited love and occasionally requited lust. With a fair number of explicit moments.
The film premiered at Venice and is also screening at Toronto. Reviewers have commented on how far Craig’s performance lies from his most famous turn as James Bond. But it’s as big a jump for the 30-year-old Starkey who, until now, was best known for teen-slanting fare like Love, Simon and The Hate You Give, or for playing Rafe Cameron in the Netflix adventure series Outer Banks. His turn in Queer is another thing entirely. The film was picked up ahead of its premiere at the Venice Film Festival by A24, which is planning a release later this year. It’s certain to draw a new fanbase to Team Starkey.
“[Starkey] quietly sizzles in the high-waisted trousers and knit shirts of the time,” THR wrote in its breathless review of Queer. “Eugene wears his preppy wardrobe with a natural panache about which he seems oblivious.”
Daniel Craig and Drew Starky in Luca Guadagnino’s Queer
Credit: Yannis Drakoulidis/Courtesy of A24
It’s a long way from the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains where Starkey was born and raised — “my favorite place on earth. I love it and miss it dearly” — the oldest of four and son of a college basketball coach and school counselor. “I had no direct connection to filmmaking, to movies or theater,” he notes. He “sort of stumbled” into acting while studying at Western Carolina University, joining their stage and screen program. “I learned a lot, I failed a lot, but I still had no inclination of how to step into acting in movies or television.” After graduation, Starkely got an agent, moved to Atlanta, Georgia, and “started auditioning like crazy.” Slowly, the roles started coming. Initially, they were mostly blink-and-you-miss-them parts with generic character names — ‘gambling solider’ in an episode of PBS series Mercy Street, ‘frat boy’ in Bart Layton’s American Animals.
“The turning point I think was Love, Simon and The Hate You Give (both 2018),” says Starkey. (Though in the latter, his character, “cop” still doesn’t have a name.) “Those were two movies that were really validating for me. But every job was a huge step forward. I remember doing one scene in Ozark (playing ‘boy’) right out of college. I didn’t know what the show was, but I knew it was Netflix. And I was like, ‘Wow, I guess I can do a Netflix show.’”
He got the job in Queer almost by accident when another director, who had seen Starkey audition for another role, handed his tape to Guadagnino.
“I got a call from my agent who said: ‘Luca Guadagnino wants to have breakfast with you,’” he recalls. “So I had breakfast with him, and we talked about our lives, we talked about the weather, and we talked about Los Angeles, and he brought up this project that he’s been working on and asked if I could put a few scenes on tape.”
More months, more meals, and more conversations later, he got the call. He was in.
Drew Starkey, Luca Guadagnino, and Daniel Craig in Venice for the world premiere of Queer
Getty
Starkey knew the source material. Sort of.
“I kind of half-read, or pretended to read Junkie in high school and pretended to understand what it meant,” he says. “With the Beat Generation, I really connected with Allen Ginsburg and Jack Kerouac, those kinds of cats. But I knew about Burroughs, and his influence across all kinds of mediums, punk rock and art. He’s kind of the godfather of this generation”
But playing Eugene “was very daunting at first, the role scared me,” says Starkey, “because it was different than most of the characters I’ve played. There’s so much subtlety and delicacy to it. It was a real challenge because no one can read him, no one understands him, least of all (Craig’s character) Lee. So it was my job to try, as best I could, to understand what was going on inside this guy.”
The confusion and (sexual) ambiguity in Eugene, says Starkey, is also a reflection of the time “when (gay men) didn’t even have a language to define themselves.”
The film’s erotic scenes might seem shocking to some, but Starkey took them in stride.
“I think as American audiences, we can be very uptight about that stuff, sex scenes, whatever, which is strange,” he says, “It feels a little prudish to be like ‘ooh if that’s in a movie that taboo’ but if it’s on our phones, it’s fine. [I’m glad] sexuality is coming back to the theaters because I think it’s imperative we integrate sexuality into our stories, it’s the way to better understand ourselves. You learn so much about a person by looking at the way they are intimate with one another.”
And if that person is Daniel Craig, it’s best to just get sweaty and start wrestling.
“Rolling around on the floor with someone, the second day you met, is a pretty good way to get to know them.”
