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