Daniel Craig’s Racy Turn in Luca Guadagnino’s ‘Queer’ Earns Raves at Venice Film Festival With 9-Minute Standing Ovation

Chris Gardner and Patrick Brzeski
·3 min read
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The Venice Film Festival showered Luca Guadagnino’s Queer with lots of love Tuesday night at the film’s world premiere. In particular, the capacity crowd inside Sala Grande went wild for star Daniel Craig, who broke away from his James Bond persona for a provocative and challenging role opposite Drew Starkey, who also earned cheers from the capacity crowd that included Pedro Almodóvar.

The Spanish auteur, who is also in the Venice competition with his buzzy drama The Room Next Door, was seated across the row from Guadagnino and his cast. He embraced them one by one during the lengthy standing ovation. Craig looked emotional at several points as his wife, Rachel Weisz, was beaming and hollering in unison with the crowd while standing on her feet.

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The world premiere, which he ended with a 9.5-minute standing ovation, also marked a triumphant return to the Lido for the Italian auteur after his previous feature, the sexy tennis drama Challengers, was forced to pull out as Venice’s opening movie last year due to delays related to the Hollywood actors strike. Based on the novel by William S. Burroughs and adapted by screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes, who also wrote Challengers, Queer is set in 1950s Mexico City, where the action follows Craig’s character William Lee.

An American expat in his mid-50s, William is leading a solitary existence in Mexico City. Addicted to opiates and alcohol, his life changes when a young man, Starkey’s Eugene Allerton, arrives on the scene, stirring Craig’s character into earth-shattering infatuation. The film — sprinkled with racy, fleetingly full-frontal scenes (including anal sex) — culminates in the search for a drug that William believes will let him communicate with Eugene telepathically.

Daniel Craig and Drew Starky appear in a still from Luca Guadagnino's Queer.
Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey in Queer.

Guadagnino has said that he and his team saw around 300 young actors for the plum part, but they kept coming back to the Outer Banks star to play Allerton. He credits Call Me by Your Name producer Peter Spears (Nomadland, Bones and All) with alerting him to Starkey’s talents after showing him a self-tape he had from another project. Craig and Starkey topline a cast that also includes Lesley Manville, Jason Schwartzman, Henrique Zaga, Andra Ursuta, Andrés Duprat, Ariel Shulman, Drew Droege, Michael Borremans, David Lowery, Lisandro Alonso and Colin Bates.

Also notable is that the cast features rising pop phenom Omar Apollo in his acting debut. Apollo, who broke out with a viral single “Evergreen” on his critically acclaimed album Ivory, has also spoken openly about being gay and how his own LGBTQ experience has shaped his music.

The 135-minute Queer — hailing from Fremantle and Frenesy Film Company and to be released by A24 — boasts a roster of fellow bold-faced name collaborators. The Oscar-winning team of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross scored the music, while Loewe creative director Jonathan Anderson served as costume designer. It’s the fashion designer’s second straight collaboration with Guadagnino after first making his film debut on Challengers, starring Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist.

Perhaps because of Anderson’s involvement, or simply that Tuesday delivered the world premiere of the buzzy new film, it was a fashionable night on the Lido with some of the stars from the film wearing Loewe, including Craig, who went viral earlier this summer when his new campaign for the fashion house dropped.

Daniel Craig and Drew Starky appear in a still from Luca Guadagnino's Queer.
Craig and Starkey in Queer.

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