And so it begins! Drew is featured in this month’s issue of GQ Magazine! The feature introduces Drew to a much wider audience as promotion for Queer somewhat begins. It gives a background on Drew and his earlier projects, and how he landed his first major film role. Check out the outtakes in our gallery, and an excerpt of the article below. I have also added full scans of his one-page features in the USA and France issues of the magazine. If you’re not able to read the full article on GQ’s website due to paywall, you can read it in full in our press archive!

Photo Sessions > 2024 > 001: GQ
Magazine Scans > 2024 > GQ USA – March 2024
Magazine Scans > 2024 > GQ France – March 2024

The actor Drew Starkey only recently turned 30, but there’s a part of him that already feels like a geezer. Like, he can already see himself making excuses instead of going out. “Sorry, I can’t stay out too late. I’m in my thirties,” he jokes. “It’s a strange duality though, because I feel old but I also still think I’m like 17.”

On a winter Saturday afternoon, Starkey and I are leaning into noncommittal adulthood: afternoon beers at an old-school Irish firefighter pub across from the 9/11 Memorial in Lower Manhattan. The place is packed—we divide and conquer to find a pair of seats. After we each take a lap, it’s clear we’ll need to finagle: Starkey grabs me a spare barstool and we belly up to the wooden bar’s brass railing, squeezed in between fellow patrons. The room is humid and smells like onion rings. Shedding a black J.W. Anderson hoodie printed with stills from the 1976 horror film CARRIE, Starkey looks nondescript in baggy blue carpenter jeans and a white T-shirt. His blond hair is freshly buzzed. As we settle in, a nearby man in a baseball cap, who looks to be in his 50s or 60s, throws an enthusiastic nod in our direction. “Drew!” he shouts from across the bar, raising his pint like he’s just seen an old pal. Instinctually, Drew waves back.

I wonder: Do we know this gentleman in the baseball cap? Starkey chuckles. “Not at all.”

It’s unclear if the man knew exactly who Drew Starkey was, either. He’s already one of the established stars of OUTER BANKS, the wildly popular Netflix teen-drama series that premiered during the height of the pandemic lockdown, and soon he’ll play the object of Daniel Craig’s obsession in the upcoming Luca Guadagnino film QUEER, an adaptation of William S. Burroughs’s post-World War II novella about the entanglement of two American G.I. expats in 1940s Mexico City. Who knows how much longer he’ll be able to wander into crowded firefighters bars like this.

“I feel like I don’t have interactions like that. That was a weird one,” he says, sipping a Guinness. (He might be playing coy—we are subjected to well-meaning interruptions by no fewer than five more strangers over the next hour.)

For those whose algorithms have not yet lured them to OUTER BANKS, the show follows a ragtag group of teens who live on the barrier islands off the North Carolina coast, a world populated by working-class islanders who call themselves “pogues” (as in pogies, a bottom-of-the-food-chain fish) and the privileged local rich kids the pogues call “kooks.” The show is shot as though it takes place in a perpetual golden hour, and involves some of the usual soap-opera tropes: buried treasure, absentee parents, emotionally fraught friendcest. Everyone is so good-looking you reckon they’d all be better off gunning for virality on TikTok than hunting for shipwrecked gold at the bottom of the Atlantic.

In it, Starkey plays Rafe Cameron, the violently unstable “kook” older brother of Sarah Cameron (played by Madelyn Cline, who parlayed her breakthrough here into a role also opposite Daniel Craig in Netflix’s Knives Out sequel Glass Onion) and one of the show’s primary antagonists. Over three seasons, Rafe transforms from a smug, preppy menace—the type of guy who likes American Psycho for all the wrong reasons—into a rip-roaring, action-movie-type villain. (The character also undergoes a notable hair transformation in season three, ditching a floppy middle part for the hot-guy buzz cut the actor is currently sporting IRL. According to PopSugar, this haircut in itself made Rafe “decidedly harder to root against.”) He is one of the more emotionally complicated characters in the series, and Starkey makes him a draw.

GQ

Drew and co-star Omar Apollo had a conversation on the road for Interview Magazine! They mostly talked about their film Queer and Omar asked Drew some interesting rapid-fire questions. This interview was done just an hour after Drew saw the film! Check out the gorgeous photoshoot in our gallery, and you can read the full interview in our press archive.

Photo Sessions > 2024 > 002: Interview

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