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.
So: Starkey is a November Scorpio. He’s a millennial. He is from the mountains of North Carolina and in his speech there’s often the barest hint of twang. He loves Charleston and claims it’s home to some of the best restaurants he’s ever eaten at. His first theatre role was in fifth grade – an original play by his school’s music teacher in which he played a warrior. He is the eldest of four siblings (they’re his best friends). He is 6ft 2in, according to internet sleuths. He played ‘Boy’ in season one, episode five of Ozark. If he could be in any other Guadagnino movie he would be a witch in Suspiria (2018). If he could pick five pieces of art to describe himself – a question he hates so much that he tries to change the subject immediately, squinting at himself in the camera and asking if I can see the “dirt make-up” they put on him for the cover shoot (I can’t) – they would be: Erik Satie’s “Gymnopédie #1” (listening to it feels like “what Sufjan Stevens did to me, where I felt nostalgia for something I’d never experienced before”), Patti Smith’s book Just Kids and three The Lord of the Rings movies. (“That’s me,” he jokes, “that’s who I am.”) The last movie he logged on Letterboxd was Possession (he won’t tell me what he gave it, but most of the movies he sees he just rates four or five stars, he says. “I like most movies. I feel weird being like, ‘three stars’.”) Starkey is skilled at pivoting attention towards anyone other than himself – whether that’s his castmates on Outer Banks; Craig; Guadagnino; his college acting teacher, Brenda Lilly, at Western Carolina University (who he says gave him the push towards professional acting), his childhood friend, Hunter Schronce (with whom he used to write “shitty horror scripts”); or even me, which is disarming for an interviewer. Everybody Starkey talks about is elevated to the most interesting person in the world.
In 2020, the first season of Outer Banks came out on Netflix. “It was our show and Tiger King,” he says. “Hell yeah, I watched Joe Exotic!” But because of Covid it was only until after the second season was released that Starkey and the cast felt the real-world implications of the show’s popularity. “I think it was a blessing in disguise, just because it sort of eased us into it. I think it was good for our egos too.” A season-three buzzcut propelled him fully into teen sex symboldom. His character, Rafe, is perfectly villainous, a sneering rich kid who bounces off the walls in coke-induced tantrums.
Queer pushes him further into the mainstream. He’s the rare and potentially potent confluence of leading man plucked from YA land (Austin Butler bounced from Zoey 101 to Ned’s Declassified to The Carrie Diaries; Robert Pattinson had The Twilight Saga; Jacob Elordi had The Kissing Booth) and alum of the Guadagnino School of Breaking Out, a growing coterie including Timothée Chalamet (Call Me by Your Name), Taylor Russell (Bones and All), and Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist (Challengers). Even his name has ‘star’ in it. He’s exuberant but also easygoing. He’s self-critical but aware that’s not necessarily a good thing. It’s not difficult to make him laugh.
He’s handsome like the hottest friend of your older brother, but like all great actors, possesses the ability to shapeshift. For Queer, Starkey slimmed down: in real life he’s substantial, more Elordi than Chalamet. But the most salient comparison is a different, surprising, heartthrob. “Yeah, I got a little bit of Troy Bolton in me,” he grins, a nod to the easygoing jock played by Zac Efron in the High School Musical films. Starkey’s dad is the head women’s basketball coach at Kent State University. Making fun of himself, he tells me, “It’s like, you know, basketball was my first love. And then I was like, ‘No, Dad, I want to sing and dance, you know, I’m meant to be an actor.’” He describes the feeling: “You probably have this when you’re writing. Sometimes you can hit a flow where it feels like this is what I’m meant to be doing, and it’s second nature. It’s unconscious in some way. And l feel like that happens, at least for me, very rarely, and striving for that is I think what makes it so addictive.”
With his rocketing profile, Starkey is fairly private and uses social media mostly to promote movies. He finds the unbridled horniness for him that’s taken over the internet surreal. “You can say anything you want online under the guise of any identity,” he says, shaking his head. “Even the positive stuff, I don’t know what’s true or not. Because it’s like, would these people say these things to my face? I feel like if I’m on the internet all day it can become delusional, and I don’t want to lose my mind.” Starkey talks about fame like someone getting socks for Christmas, but a present is a present. Having only just turned 31, he’s content that all of this is happening now. A younger version of himself might not have handled it so well. A self-proclaimed troublemaker, he tells me with a smile, he’s mellowed out a lot over the years. I don’t know if I believe it.
In Queer, Starkey creates trouble just by being the object of obsession. It’s a story about the romantic anguish of, as Guadagnino puts it, “unsynchronised love”. With costumes by Loewe’s creative director Jonathan Anderson, Queer takes place in the fictionalised Burroughs dreamscape of 1950s Mexico City, a disorienting metropolis where cockfights break out on the street and heroin is easy to acquire. The film is piloted by Lee (Craig), Burroughs’ stand-in, a man whose frothing discontent often spills over into violence, both towards himself and his north star – the frozen and perpetually out of reach Eugene (Starkey). As Eugene, Starkey glides through the movie, his coolness leading Lee into the jungles of Latin America to acquire yagé (otherwise known as ayahuasca), a drug that promises mind-bending properties. For anyone who’s been in a brutal situationship or watched even a single episode of Sex and the City, the question that arises midway through the film might be familiar: Maybe he’s just not that into you? But, as Starkey puts it, “There’s this deep kind of longing underneath the surface with both of these characters, except one presents it more. There’s some type of misfiring within Lee that won’t allow him to express that.”
That problem of connection resonated with Starkey when he read the script. “That fear of someone truly getting to know who you are is one that I struggled with for, I mean, the majority of my life,” he says. “That can stop people in their tracks.” For the characters in Queer, men will literally do ayahuasca before communicating efficiently. For Starkey, the search for connection means making a concentrated effort to be present, both in his personal life and while he’s acting.
Working opposite Craig provided a masterclass in presence. “His ability to be like, ‘Oh, great, moving on.’ Like, oh, yeah, right, same – I’m not thinking about what I just did on repeat.” Fittingly for a movie about queer love – all that it is and all that it isn’t – the sex scenes are plentiful and propulsive. There are blowjobs given to singer Omar Apollo and sex scenes imbued with that “I can’t believe this is happening” energy of wanting someone urgently. Over the course of promoting the film, Starkey has gotten a lot of questions about the erotic scenes. “There’s a lot of, ‘What’s up with the younger generations like, being uptight?’ I don’t know. I don’t know if they are!” About the sex, he tells me: “I think it’s the ultimate form of honesty shown on screen. That’s the ultimate form of communication, how they’re intimate with one another. It’s as present as you can be with another person.”
Starkey attributes Burroughs’ lasting cultural impact to his honesty. “Jesus, the mid-20th century, coming out of a post-war time, was so tough for people. I mean, the counterculture movement was born from that. There’s a rebellious nature to it. It’s punk before punk. I think every generation [since] goes back to the source and sees that these ideas, specifically within American culture, are bred from that generation of writing. I mean, you read Naked Lunch and you’re like, ‘This needs to be banned now.’” He smiles cheekily. “I think that generation just called people and culture out for their bullshit. It’s unrelenting honesty. And I think it’s even more important now, especially in the age of the internet – there’s a lot of fluff out there. You can see the influence Burroughs specifically had on punk music in the 90s and 2000s. It’s like, you know… He was the guy!”
Unselfconscious about his weak ending, Starkey pitches his voice up like Jerry Seinfeld to repeat, “He was the GUY, you know?” In Burroughs’ canon, Queer is early, a novel created before his tone and identity fully solidified into the Burroughs that’s embedded in contemporary culture. Guadagnino’s adaptation creates a delicate moment where the inevitability of who Burroughs was to become hovers just off screen. Talking to Starkey, it feels like we’re in a comparable liminal space, just waiting for the rest of the world to catch up. On the Zoom, Starkey whips his head out of frame suddenly, but the strange AI face tracking software catches him. Laughing, he bobs his head up and down, as if trying to outrun his own image.