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
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