'Let's Have Fun,' Drew Starkey Told Daniel Craig When Filming Sex Scenes in 'Queer'

On the first day of shooting of "Queer," Drew Starkey was frightened. The 29-year old actor, who appears in the Netflix series "Outer Banks," was cast by Luca Guadagnino to be Daniel Craig's remote love interest in "Queer," the much-anticipated adaptation of the novel by William Burroughs that is making a splash this week at the Venice Film Festival prior to its fall release.

In a Variety interview, Starkey explains how Guadagnino picked him to play the role from a number of audition tapes the actor had sent out. The two met over where they discussed the role of Eugene Allerton, a young student in 1950s Mexico City who American expat William Lee (Daniel Craig) becomes infatuated with, and Starkey was offered the role. Then the two spent months discussing how he was to play the part, which was something of a a 180-degree turn from the hotheaded character Starkey plays on Netflix's "Outer Banks."

Guadagnino asked him early on the process if he could "play hard to read." To which Starkey replied: "I do it every day in my life. I'm a pretty hard to read person, I feel like. But yes, he's an ambiguous figure and kind of restricted in his own self, but there's a sense of longing there... He's very mysterious and ambiguous, but also loving. And I'm still – it sounds crazy, but I swear I'm still asking questions about him. I still think about him. He was very hard to crack and it was the biggest challenge I've ever had as an actor, which was really fun."

What was most important, though, was his developing a relationship with Craig, but after his initial nervousness, went smoothly. "I think everyone's starstruck when Daniel walks into the room. But then of course, within five minutes that sheds away and you're like, 'Oh, right.' He's an incredibly kind, goofy, beautiful person and very giving actor and a good friend. He's all of it. But yeah, I mean it was about the work and we just got into it really quickly. He never took anything too seriously. Of course, I was approaching it like, 'Oh my god, this is crazy' But Daniel always kept it light, and I would have imploded on that set if Daniel wasn't there just to keep it moving. He's the best."

Starkey notes that what happens in the story is what happened on the set – two men getting to know each other. "We had a handful of table reads and Luca was the guiding factor in the way these two operated. He always said, 'There has to be love there,' so we always had that in mind. But Daniel and I jumped into movement rehearsals and choreography with each other – that's a great way to get to know someone. But it felt cohesive and natural. Nothing felt forced. We just jumped in like, 'Alright, we're game.'"

Being "game" was a most important factor due to the intimate sex scenes the men filmed. "You treat it like you would any other thing. Obviously, you're more precious with it and you communicate more on the day about people's comfort levels. But Daniel and I were just game for anything. We just were like, 'Let's go for it, let's have fun.' So he was a great partner to have in that. I think him and I share that same mentality of just not giving a shit. And Luca was so specific – he wanted us to be as comfortable as possible throughout that process, and we would block off where these intimate scenes would happen and we talked months in advance about what we thought it should be. It was also like a dance. We were trying to figure it out. But those were some of the most fun days I think we all had on set – just Daniel and I laughing."

Starkey was also interviewed by Omar Apollo for Interview Magazine. (Apollo also appears in "Queer" and has his own sex scene with Craig). In their conversation, the out musician said he was impressed by Starkey performance, saying "Oh my god, you're a totally different person." But Starkey replies he was nervous watching his footage, but after he did, he felt he could breathe a bit. "Sometimes you work on things and you have a vision of how it's going to be, and then it goes through the editing process and postproduction, and you're like, 'Oh, shit. That's not what I had in mind for it at all.' But Luca did a good job of communicating how it was going to feel and the way it was going to be shaped and put together. So it matched the vision in my head more or less, which was cool."

But. Starkey admits, finding the character of Allerton "was incredibly difficult. My character Allerton, there's not a lot of verbalizing that he has in the film. Two weeks in, I was talking to Daniel. I was like, 'I feel like I'm not doing anything.' He was like, 'Oh, you want to signal. You want to be one of the airline guys on the runway with the two things signaling the plane. Every- one wants to do that. You want to show what you're feeling. But no one does that in their real life.' And I was like, 'Yeah, you're right.'"

Apollo also noted that Starkey's life was going to change dramatically when "Queer" is released. While filming in Rome, Starkey, a North Carolina country boy, confesses how he felt "out-of-place" in Hollywood. "It didn't seem far-fetched in terms of me dreaming of it, but in terms of access, I thought it was impossible to get here. I'm also stepping into the world a little bit. I just turned 30 this year. If I came out to L.A. when I was 18, I would have crashed and burned."