OMAR APOLLO: Dog, I’m in Australia. I miss your little dumb ass.
DREW STARKEY: I miss you, dude. How’s tour?
APOLLO: Really good. We just played Sydney last night. The crowd was great. Only good vibes. Heading to Brisbane, about to hop on the plane in a little bit.
STARKEY: Hell yeah.
APOLLO: We should talk about when we went to the—what was it? Bungalows. You were on a crazy diet. [Laughs]
STARKEY: So were you. You were on a soup diet.
APOLLO: I wanted to look good.
STARKEY: That was the first time we officially met. I met you at one of your shows the year before, but the first time we had an actual conversation, Dylan [Shanks, Apollo’s manager] was like, “You guys should
have dinner before you go out to Italy.” And I was like, “Great.” It was a breath of fresh air talking to you, because I was so nervous leading up to the movie. And talking to you, you were like, “I’m scared, bro.”
APOLLO: It’s really good to feel scared.
STARKEY: You know what’s wild though? The timing of this. I just saw Queer like an hour ago.
APOLLO: How was it? I heard you were amazing in it.
STARKEY: You were amazing in it. You were like this old-fashioned movie star. I screamed when you came on screen.
APOLLO: I’ve only seen bits of my part. But dude, I’m excited. I remember being on set the first day. I didn’t see you yet because Rome was kind of crazy for all of us, but I was watching Daniel [Craig] do a scene where he’s throwing something on a table. Then Luca showed me your scenes. I was like, “Oh my god, you’re a totally different person.”
STARKEY: I was nervous seeing it. Now it’s like, “I can breathe a bit.” Because 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.
APOLLO: How’d you feel this morning when you knew you were going to go watch it? Because I know you have some really, really intimate scenes.
STARKEY: Well, I’d seen most of them during ADR, and you know that ADR is fun.
APOLLO: It is. It was so funny. Luca was like, “Can you do noises?” I was like, “Okay.”
STARKEY: It’s always exertion and breaths and groans. Just you in a booth alone doing that, you feel like you’re in an insane asylum.
APOLLO: I know. This is going to change your life completely. They got a new “it” girl, for real. We talked about this when we were drunk one night in Rome. You mentioned that you felt out of place in Hollywood. How do you feel about that now?
STARKEY: I remember talking to you very drunkenly. You and I both feel a bit out of place, like outliers. I’m from the middle of nowhere, North Carolina. You’re from Indiana. 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.
Interview Magazine
