Drew Starkey Talks Luca Guadagnino’s ‘Queer,’ Working With Daniel Craig & Doing ADR For Sex Scenes

Natalie Oganesyan
·3 min read
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Outer Banks star Drew Starkey reminisced on his time filming opposite Daniel Craig in Luca Guadagnino’s upcoming period romance drama Queer, describing his co-star as “game for anything” and reflecting on working with a “dream” director.

In a new Q&A moderated by fellow co-star and alt-pop/R&B musician Omar Apollo for Interview magazine, Starkey gave behind-the-scenes tidbits on the film shoot, including how “fun” doing ADR (automated dialogue replacement, a post-production process) was for the sex scenes he shot with Craig.

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“It’s always exertion and breaths and groans,” Starkey said. “Just you in a booth alone doing that, you feel like you’re in an insane asylum.”

Starkey, who hails from North Carolina and first broke out playing the conniving and privileged Rafe in Netflix’s teen treasure hunt soap, described the experience as a masterclass in filmmaking, saying Guadagnino was “on a short list of dream directors” he wanted to work with. Acting alongside Craig, he added that he “could have thrown all my years of acting school out the window.”

“[Craig is] so fucking good at every aspect of his craft, just homed in every day,” Starkey said. “And he’s such a weirdo, dude … He’s absolutely fucking incredible in this film. He’s really shattering … Very vulnerable, because as an actor, he could give a shit, dude. He’s the most punk person. He’s game for anything. He’s like, ‘Yeah, whatever. Let’s do it. Who cares what anyone thinks?'”

Shooting on the film lasted two and a half months, prior to which Starkey dropped 30 pounds for the role — a number so stark that the Call Me By Your Name Oscar nominee asked him to “bring it back up a little bit.” Another physical transformation was leaning into the usage of makeup, as his character is described as “having feminine features.”

“It was really difficult because it felt like a very delicate high-wire act,” Starkey said of his portrayal. “You step too far to the right and it teeters off into a direction it doesn’t need to. You step to the left, and it’s like, ‘Oh, this is way off.'”

Set in 1950s Mexico City and based on the novel of the same name by William S. Burroughs (not published until 30 years later, in 1985), Queer follows Lee (Craig), an American ex-pat living a solitary life in his forties in a small working-class and collegiate community. The story unfolds alongside the arrival of Eugene Allerton (Starkey), a young student whom Lee is driven to pursue.

Starkey said his character, who exists alongside a cast of larger-than-life people played by Jason Schwartzman and Lesley Manville, does not have “a lot of verbalizing” and that he leaned on Craig to provide direction on how to “show” rather than tell what Allerton was feeling.

“Part of the allure of Allerton with Lee is not being able to nail him down and define him,” he explained. “That’s what makes him interesting to him. There’s a constant discussion about whether he’s queer or not … Playing that ambiguity was the fun part. It was really tough at first because you want something really concrete as an actor, but I had to lean into a bit more ambiguity for this one, which is a different challenge.”

As reported exclusively by Deadline last week, Queer has found a distributor in A24, which will release it by end of year for awards contention. Its world premiere will be at the Venice Film Festival tomorrow, Sept. 3, with a North American debut at TIFF. The film sees Guadagnino reteam with Challengers scribe Justin Kuritzkes.

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