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Queer Makes Drew Starkey a Movie Star. Its Impact on Him Was Even More Profound

The Outer Banks star redefines himself as Daniel Craig’s enigmatic lover. Over lunch with Vanity Fair, he calls the role “a wake-up call for me.”

By David Canfield

September 13, 2024

media.vanityfair.com

Photo by Greg Williams

“This is my breakfast,” Drew Starkey proclaims as a plate of medium-rare steak and potatoes gets placed in front of him, a near-empty cup of black coffee to its side. He woke up at noon, coming off of a late-night screening of his new movie Queer, for his final day in Toronto. It’s the last meal the 30-year-old star will have before he flies home, taking a pause from the glamorous fall-festival circuit. He’s just walked the same Venice red carpet as Angelina Jolie and Nicole Kidman; he’s newly swept up into the A24 family. Things are moving fast. As he searches for a fork, it’s natural to wonder how he’s taking it all in.

The answer to that is hardly simple, in part because Starkey’s been on a journey of introspection since he was cast in Queer well over a year ago. An adaptation of William S. Burroughs’s semi-autobiographical 1985 novel, the film directed by Luca Guadagnino takes an elliptical approach to the story of a slippery romance between two men in mid-century Mexico City. Lee (Daniel Craig) becomes infatuated with a beautiful, enigmatic younger man named Allerton (Starkey), whose sexual proclivities prove maddeningly difficult to read. They become intimate—as captured by Guadagnino in explicit, passionate detail—and eventually travel both around South America and into the depths of their own subconscious (via a trippy ayahuasca sequence). One piece of dialogue, spoken at different points by both of them, haunts their courtship: “I’m not queer, I’m disembodied.”

Starkey references the line at one point over our meal. A feeling of disembodiment rushed up in him about as soon as he finished production on Queer, one of many reasons he’s still processing the film’s impact on him. Its professional impact may be clearer: The star of Netflix’s Outer Banks and teen films like Love, Simon reintroduces himself here with a rich, complex, and brave performance that ought to open new doors. But as we chat, he sounds more interested in the personal doors Allerton may have introduced him to.

At the film’s Toronto premiere the night before our interview, Starkey revealed on stage that Guadagnino first described Allerton to him as a “nasty bitch.” Naturally, we began there.

Vanity Fair: Let’s start with “nasty bitch.” How do you react when you get that description for your character?

Drew Starkey: Luca was being cheeky, but in earlier conversations we had, he talked about Allerton as cold and slippery and very hard to read—and Lee is always trying to put his finger on the pulse or define him in some way. He’s always just out of grasp or just out of reach. There’s a quote that Burroughs had in the original Queer from 1985, one of the last paragraphs. In the sentence, it says something to the effect of, “What happened to that knife called Allerton?” That image was always really an anchor for me. So, a nasty bitch. [Laughs]

You’ve talked about how you are still figuring him out.

I’m going to give you a Burroughs quote. For the last few days, I’ve had his quotes in mind.

Just for the last few days?

[Laughs] Well, the past year-and-a-half. But he was talking about writing Junkie versus writing Queer. He said that he felt like he was the one writing Junkie but he felt as if Queer was writing him. That kind of mirrored my experience in the filming of it. I felt like I did all my work, and I had to let Allerton lead me—which is so different from the way that I’ve worked in the past. It was a lot of meditating and letting things happen. But it was tough. It was really tough.

What does surrendering to the material feel like?

It feels like you’re holding onto a plane crash. You’re like, “I hope I survive this.” There’s an energy to it. [Costume designer] Jonathan Anderson is a friend of Elton John’s, who was an incredible help in terms of the wardrobe and what he wears. So much of it was the image of Allerton, what Lee is drawn into and sucked into. That was really a lot of the focus: What’s the silhouette going to be here?

I was going to ask you about the physicality. You move in a very specific, alluring way.

Well, I lost a lot of weight for it. There’s only a few photos of Lewis Marker, who Allerton was based on, but he was very thin. The bodies of that time were not very muscular.

There was just a great essay in TheNew York Times that touched on that, specifically related to the show Fellow Travelers.

Yeah, I wanted to avoid that. I see it a lot, in a kind of mid-century period setting—because that’s such a modern look. This was about a four-month process of losing about 30 pounds. At first, I stopped eating. Not a great idea. Then I worked with a nutritionist. I got a little bit too skinny at one point and then he was like, “Wait, wait, wait.” But that really did change the way I felt and moved. It felt very natural. And then [Daniel and I] were in, essentially, a dance class with each other. My body felt a lot more fluid and I think that kind of informed my gait. It felt like a lot of outside-in work, which was fun.

You clearly sensed this was a major opportunity. What scared you the most?

Living up to material. I felt a lot of pressure, maybe too much. I was quite nervous, and usually I feel okay. And this was like my heart was racing on the first day. One, Luca and the words of Burroughs, and then Justin Kuritzkes did such an amazing job with [the script]. But then working with Daniel and Lesley [Manville] and Jason [Schwartzman], it was an amazing cast. I felt like I was being found out. I never really had that before.

And given the weight loss, you had a lot of time to think about it before even stepping on that set. Could you think about anything else?

No. I was just engrossed with everything. All my responsibilities went out the window. I mean, every day I woke up and thought about it. It really felt like who I was for a year and a half. I’m not one that can really detach from a role and work in that way. It has to be: Blinders on. I can’t separate.

Everyone’s last day of shooting was the final scene you see in the movie. It was Daniel and me, and it was very emotional on the last day. I never really cry. And I’m crying! Just because it was so—it was so much. It was such a release.

Did you feel generally nervous to do sex scenes as you would be asked to do in this movie?

Not more than any other film, any other sex scene. But there was so much conversation around it, too. Luca made it a point during the first two weeks in Rome, when we had table readings and rehearsals, to separate those and talk about those as their own thing. Get comfortable with it. Daniel and I had been familiar with each other enough that by the time we got there, it felt like any other day.

Really?

It, strangely enough, did. There was such a comfort in our bodies. We were really, for months, essentially in a kind of choreographed jujitsu. There was no trepidation. There was no shying away from the nude scenes at all. Dan and I just wanted it to exude a type of truth and normalcy, how two people would be intimate with one another. You don’t want to put anything on top of it. Yeah, so strangely enough, no, it didn’t. It really didn’t.

To your point about the choreography though, there are specific sex scenes that indicate where the characters are in relation to each other, in terms of power and connection. How did you balance the jujitsu you’re talking about with that sense of intimacy?

We would talk with Luca about how he had a picture for it, his ideals for a given scene. We would just walk through it, but then left some freedom to let things happen. That’s the way Luca works in general. He’ll have a specific idea like, “Here’s my idea for what I think it should be, how I think it should be played out.” And then it’s a very intimate, small, closed set. Only the camera operator, Bianca [Butti] was with us. Months prior, of course, that was something that I was weighing like, “Oh, my God”—I was pretty nervous about it. When you read the script and you see the scene, you go like, “Oh, man.” But Luca was very, very particular about, “I will do nothing that you are uncomfortable with.” We had an open dialogue about all that. And Daniel is also such a giving person. He’s a great partner. Once we got into working, all of that was fine.

The final chapter of the film centers on Lee and Allerton doing ayahuasca. Have you done ayahuasca before?

No, but I’m interested. I feel like I’ll know when it’s time to; I don’t think right now is the right time. It hasn’t called to me. But we had some crew who had done ayahuasca and it was a great reference. It was like: “Okay, how did it feel in your body? How did it feel to walk? How nauseous were you?” That part was really fun. Yeah, I’ve never done ayahuasca—yet. But it seems, I don’t know. I certainly have some things that I need to address.

What can you share about that?

This year, I definitely got happier with myself. The past five years or so it’s been fast-paced and always going. Funnily enough, the strike happened and I felt incredibly disembodied. I had nothing to latch on to. I actually thought about Burroughs in that time, and his relationship with what he calls the ugly spirit. It’s this version of yourself that only wants to destroy, and how to make destruction your friend. I really did a lot of soul-searching, because we finished right before the strike happened. It was like boom-boom—I had this very intense, beautiful, creative kind of experience, and then nothing. I was a little mad.

Did you feel like work was important to keeping those feelings at bay?

Yeah, and maybe it’s not really that active. It’s just, I care so much about this and I want to do this, and that’s a byproduct. You lose a sense of yourself. That’s definitely my relationship with acting. I don’t feel like a confident person. I love life and I love tackling life, but in some way, I’m substituting the job for therapy. I never have admitted that I was doing that. And then this past year, I was like, “Oh, that is what I’m doing.” Now I need to actually ask questions about myself and consider myself, and talk and communicate. I didn’t do that a lot about what I was going through. I love to work and I love to distract myself.

It’s interesting to be going through that while you’re playing a character who is so non-verbal.

Mm-hmm. I’ve thought about this a lot. Even though Allerton felt like the hardest person to be, he also felt like the closest person to me in a way. In a lot of ways I really, really understood him and it felt like me—the way he moves through the world, the way he interacts with people. It was like, “Oh, right, that’s how I would be.” Maybe he was a wake-up call for me.

You already alluded to it, but I was going to ask you: What does, “I’m not queer. I’m disembodied” mean to you? Clearly, you’re someone who thinks a lot about Burroughs these days, and it is the core line of the film.

Oh, I’ve thought a lot about Burroughs. I think it’s the inability to define yourself. He doesn’t use language to express anything, to show his admiration or how he feels. Luca always said in the beginning of this, “It’s not a story about unrequited love. It’s a story about unsynchronized love.” Having that type of love can make you feel more detached from yourself. These are two people who do have this love for each other, and it’s beautiful—you see fleeting moments of it, and you see Lee attach himself to those moments. But they’re operating on two different planes of time in some way. That can make you feel more disconnected, experiencing that and confronting that with your counterpart, than even being alone can. [Pause] Yeah, I think I answered?

Very much so. It’s a movie that prods some deeper introspection, so I appreciate the answers.

Yeah, I know it’s a movie that if I saw it at 14 or 15, it would open doors for me, like: “Oh, my God.” My parents weren’t prudish in any way, but there was definitely some censorship. It was my grandma who was watching us, I was maybe 10, when she was like, “What rated-R movie do you want to watch? Pick one. Go pick one.” Me and my brother were like, “Okay!” I think we watched The Patriot or something. [Laughs] But yeah, I’ve had to go off and find those things on my own.

This interview has been edited and condensed. This story has been updated.

#drew starkey #queer film #queer #tiff 2024 #luca guadagnino #justin kuritzkes #omar apollo #daniel craig

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