Drew was also on the cover of WWD Magazine last month, specifically in the December 18th digital issue. Still part of Queer promotion, he mostly talked about the movie, navigating stardom, and much more. The full interview is available to read in our press archive! Also visit our gallery for the outtakes and scans.

Photo Sessions > 2024 > 011: WWD
Magazine Scans > 2024 > WWD – December 18, 2024

The pressure to capitalize on his Hollywood moment and fling himself at everything was never going to be Drew Starkey’s style.

“I’m not a good multitasker at all,” Starkey says. “I like to have a singular thing to focus on. A lot of my peers are really good at juggling a lot of different things at once, and I’m like, ‘how do you do that?’” he adds.

“It is nice to put almost all of your energy into one thing, and really experience it fully. That’s the only way that I know how to work, and that’s how I like to work.”

Since August, the 31-year-old has been laser-focused on “Queer,” his new film costarring Daniel Craig (who is now Golden Globe nominated for the film), Jason Schwartzman, Lesley Manville and Omar Apollo. The project, which reunites director Luca Guadagnino with his “Challengers” screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes and costume designer Jonathan Anderson (of Loewe), is based on the 1985 book by William S. Burroughs and follows an American expat living in Mexico City in the 1950s and his relationship with a younger man new to town.

Starkey’s global tour for “Queer” kicked off with the film’s premiere at the Venice Film Festival, with stops at various other film festivals, premieres and Loewe’s Paris Fashion Week show (he’s a new face of the brand, along with Craig). It’s a big undertaking for the actor, who has managed to stay largely out of the limelight despite a star status on the ascent for a few years now.

“I was a bit nervous going into it that I wouldn’t be able to handle it,” he says. “I get very overstimulated pretty easily by attention and a lot of people, but it’s been good having Luca and Daniel and Jonathan and all these great people. Us being together throughout all of it has made it really, really light and really fun.”

He’s come into the experience with a new sense of clarity after one of the busiest periods of his career. Last year, after wrapping “Queer” he headed straight to Charleston to shoot “Outer Banks,” only to be grounded by the SAG strike days later.

“It was the first time I’d really had a long break, and I was like, ‘I don’t know who I am.’ I did a lot of soul searching this year and found ways to be a little more comfortable with myself, not attached to work,” he says.

That included a week and a half of solo backpacking in Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks, along with a renewed focus on journaling.

“I am a person who really does need to give myself solitude — it’s a reminder of like, ‘oh, right, there’s an outward communication that I need to tune into a little more,’” he says. “I get so wrapped up in a creative process sometimes that I need to talk to myself more.”

His role in “Queer,” as a mysterious, quiet young man named Eugene Allerton, first entered his radar when his agents told him Guadagnino was interested in meeting for breakfast.

“I was like, ‘what the f–k?’” he says. “And then I sent in a couple auditions and we just talked about it for a few months. It was organic. I’ve never had a process like that before. I just felt like I was getting to know Luca and he was getting to know me.”

WWD

Drew also made his first talk show appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live! last month, and we couldn’t be prouder! Check out his interview below, along with official stills in our gallery! And of course, I made screencaps, enjoy!

Public Appearances > 2024 > November 25: ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!’ – Arrivals
Interviews & TV Appearances > Talk Shows > 2024: Jimmy Kimmel Live! (November 25th) – Stills
Interviews & TV Appearances > Talk Shows > 2024: Jimmy Kimmel Live! (November 25th) – Screen Captures

Drew also attended the Governors Awards last month, wearing Valentino! He absolutely stood out in red. Check out our gallery for high-quality photos of Drew at the event, including one portrait.

Public Appearances > 2024 > November 17: 15th Governors Awards
Photo Sessions > 2024 > 007: 15th Governors Awards

To start off with getting the events photos in the gallery up to date, I have added almost 200 photos of Drew at the premiere of Queer in Los Angeles!

Public Appearances > 2024 > November 13: ‘Queer’ Los Angeles Premiere

Drew is also one of the cover stars of the Winter 2024 issue of Dazed Magazine! Other cover stars are Mikey Madison, Harris Dickinson, and Pa Salieu. In this interview, he discussed Queer, working with Daniel Craig, being a Scorpio, and much more. You can read the full interview in our press archive! Also visit our gallery for the beautiful outtakes!

Photo Sessions > 2024 > 007: Dazed

In a fan edit captioned “white boy of the century”, Drew Starkey does a variety of hot-guy activities: he smiles, he licks his lips, he answers on-screen interview questions, he poses on the red carpet, he rolls up his shirtsleeves. “White boy of the century,” just one of thousands of Starkey fan cams, has one million views. The comments are ravenous: “a ride I wouldn’t survive”, “#needhim” and “Drew Starkey the man you are.”

Over Zoom with him after his cover shoot, I begin to feel the same sensation “white boy of the century” evoked; that I am being drawn towards the actor without conscious volition. I wonder if this gravitational phenomenon, one that manifests in a slow pan-in on every nod, is inextricable proof of the up-and-comer’s power, or if his camera is literally following him. “Oh yeah, I’m on my iPad and it has that weird auto face tracking. I don’t know how to turn it off. Like, what the fuck is this doing? I can be out of frame and it follows me!” He shakes his head gamely to demonstrate.

Starkey stars opposite Daniel Craig in the upcoming Luca Guadagnino film Queer, an adaptation of William S Burroughs’ semi-autobiographical novella of the same name. In auteur Guadagnino’s hands the short novel has gotten a long treatment: a two- and-a-quarter-hour ode to loving someone so much you want to live inside their head. After debuting at Venice Film Festival, the film is set to come out in December. Craig, enjoying life after Bond, is an actor at the height of his game, but for Starkey, Queer is more important. It’s star-making.

Before Queer, Starkey’s biggest role was Rafe Cameron in the popular Netflix YA thriller Outer Banks. Set on an island off the coast of North Carolina (the state Starkey grew up in), it’s a series in which everybody is ridiculously attractive and has a catchy nickname, but only some have money. Currently the show is in its fourth season and Starkey is on double shift promoting OBX and Queer – navigating the teen press fest of OBX with the full ensemble cast (they recently did a video for Cosmo called “The Outer Banks Cast Are Completely Unserious for 9 Minutes”, where the boys of OBX goof around with each other for… 10 minutes), while also sitting down to talk with journalists about working with two of the biggest names in Hollywood on an adaptation of America’s most divisive postmodern author.

Dazed

Drew is also featured in the Winter 2024 issue of Esquire Magazine! This photoshoot is gorgeous. Still as part of Queer promotion, he talked mostly about the movie in this interview. He also answered several questions in Explain This for Esquire. The full interview and the video can be found in our press archive! Also check out outtakes in our gallery.

Photo Sessions > 2024 > 006: Esquire

Two years ago, Drew Starkey was eating breakfast in L.A. with Luca Guadagnino, the Italian director behind Call Me by Your Name and Challengers. Starkey was in disbelief. Guadagnino is an Academy Award nominee who’s worked with Tilda Swinton, Timothée Chalamet, and Zendaya. Starkey had spent the past three years on Netflix’s Outer Banks—a wildly popular show (now in its fourth season) that bears little resemblance to Guadagnino’s moody, hyper-stylized films. But the director had seen the actor’s audition tape for an unrelated project and asked him to breakfast.

The topic of conversation that morning: Queer, a movie about a gay heroin addict living in Mexico City in the 1950s, based on the William S. Burroughs novel of the same name. It was Guadagnino’s next project, and he was eyeing Starkey to play opposite Daniel Craig.

“Halfway through the first meeting, I was like, ‘This is amazing, and I don’t really care what comes of it,’ ” Starkey says. “I’m getting to sit down and have deep conversations with a director—an artist—that I really look up to? That’s incredible. The whole time, I was thinking, ‘It’s not gonna happen.’ ”

It happened. After breakfast, he read the book, then reread it a few more times. He and Guadagnino kept talking for two months—a “vetting process”—before Starkey was cast. No formal audition necessary. He lost thirty pounds for the role, and he clearly studied up. Over dinner in New York, Starkey tells me about the relationship that inspired the novel, the “deep, deep longing” that Burroughs “had in real life, with this real person, up until his death.” He says he memorized Burroughs’s prose, effortlessly rattling off a line from one edition of Queer’s introduction by heart. He explains that Kurt Cobain was a disciple of Burroughs.

The movie comes out November 27, and there’s already talk of its Academy Award potential. Meanwhile, the thirty-one-year-old Starkey has become the latest object of the fashion world’s desire, sitting front-row at runway shows and appearing in an ad campaign for the white-hot label Loewe, whose creative director, Jonathan Anderson, designed the costumes for Queer. He joins the ranks of other Loewe Boys, including Josh O’Connor, Mike Faist, and Omar Apollo, who also appears in Queer. “It’s like a really dysfunctional family,” Starkey says with a laugh.

With Queer and the fourth season of Outer Banks and the fashion shows and the ad campaign and the screaming fans at the premieres in cities around the globe, Drew Starkey has entered the white-hot center of the zeitgeist. He is a man in demand.

Esquire

Drew and Daniel were on the cover in the November 6th issue of Variety Magazine! They talked all about Queer, including the audition process, rehearsals, and much more. Check out the outtakes and scans in our gallery! You can read an excerpt below, and the full interview in our press archive.

Photo Sessions > 2024 > 005: Variety
Magazine Scans > 2024 > Variety – November 06, 2024

Welcome to the world of “Queer.” Guadagnino, who pushed tennis-as-sex metaphors to thrilling heights earlier this year with “Challengers” and gave the world Timothée Chalamet fornicating with a peach in 2017’s “Call Me by Your Name,” returns to the big screen with another big swing. “Queer” is based on Beat Generation writer William S. Burroughs’ novella, published in 1985, which fictionalizes the author’s own experiences of recreational heroin use and his sensual love affair with a discharged serviceman. (In the era the book and film depict, to be gay was perhaps the more dangerous of the two experiences.)

Craig, in his first film outside the James Bond and “Knives Out” franchises in seven years, plays William Lee. On the run after a drug bust and enmeshed in a hard-drinking and edgy crowd at one of his regular watering holes, Lee encounters the beautiful and aloof Eugene Allerton (Starkey), with whom he comes to share both painful intimacies and, well … substances that were once visible in the film’s opening sequence.

There are universal aspects to “Queer” — the struggle to be truly vulnerable, the experience of falling in love and battles with insecurity. But a gay audience will likely find it particularly striking: It’s a film that’s utterly unafraid to depict both the literal fact of sexuality and the inner turmoil that leads many to use sex to escape. “I’ve been in the characters’ world before,” says the singer Omar Apollo, who plays one of Craig’s other love interests (and who, unlike Craig and Starkey, is openly queer). “You’re in a hotel, the guy’s sitting down … I feel like I’ve been there before.”

The film’s first cut came in at three and a half hours. “I’d love people to see it, because there’s other things going on,” Craig says. But even whittled down to a (relatively!) slight 135 minutes, “Queer” is capacious, making room both for a frank depiction of male sexuality and for touches of surrealistic fantasy. It’s at once as direct a documentation of gay love as anything on-screen since 2005’s “Brokeback Mountain” (pushing much farther even than Guadagnino’s “Call Me by Your Name,” which panned away from its key sex scene) and a joyful-yet-melancholy ayahuasca journey.

And it’s a turning point for both of its leads. For Craig, post-Bond and in the middle of his run as “Knives Out” sleuth Benoit Blanc, it’s a test of his star power. “Queer” isn’t designed to be a blockbuster — indeed, it’s about as risky as a film can get. (A24, which picked up the title earlier this summer before film festival season, will give the movie a limited theatrical release on Nov. 27.) How many of Craig’s fans — and how many awards voters — will join Craig on this trip? And for Starkey, it’s an introduction: After showing promise as bad boy Rafe Cameron in Netflix’s teen drama “Outer Banks,” he gets the opportunity to share the screen with a movie star — and to prove he can more than hold his own.

Together, the pair have crafted a love story every bit as distinctive as the Zendaya-led throuple in “Challengers.” “At its very core, there’s a deep love for each other,” Starkey says. “It’s their souls, beyond language, beyond their bodies — and beyond Allerton’s ability to communicate that.” Thwarted by social taboos and by their own limitations, Lee and Allerton connect fleetingly but intensely. The sex scenes that they share will likely unsettle Gen Z audiences, who have made clear that lovemaking in movies is better left off-screen.

Variety