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.
Not ten minutes after we sit down, another stranger, this time a young woman, approaches: Can I ask you a question? Your name’s not Drew, is it? Ding ding. Back at the table, her sister had insisted he was the guy from the new Hunger Games movie—as in the English actor Tom Blyth, whose character Coriolanus Snow sports an ice-blond buzz similar to Starkey’s. Like Rafe, Coriolanus is categorically a villain, whose third-act hair transformation also made him decidedly harder to root against.
Outer Banks—or as it’s designated online, OBX—was a runaway hit when it appeared on Netflix in April 2020. “During the pandemic, it was that and Tiger King,” recalls Starkey (I shudder at the memory). “Everybody was locked in their homes. It’s definitely a show that leads into escapism and adventure, so I think people were able to really live vicariously through that.” In its three seasons (with a fourth on the way), the show regularly ranks among the platform’s most-watched English-language TV series.
Born in Asheville, North Carolina, Starkey is the oldest of four kids who grew up moving around the Blue Ridge Mountains, mostly in the city of Hickory. His dad Todd is a career college-basketball coach who currently leads the women’s team at Kent State, and his mom, Jodi, is a school counselor. Both sides of the family tree bend towards acting and performance: Todd’s father was in the original Broadway cast of Once Upon a Mattress in the late 1950s, and his brother currently runs the Indianapolis Opera. Jodi’s aunt and uncle ran the first video store in Charlotte, so she watched a lot of movies as a kid—a hobby she passed along to Drew.
A shy-ish kid, Starkey got serious about acting as a high-school freshman when he landed in a drama class he likens to an SNL skit among upperclassmen aspiring to the avant-garde. It was “a lot of Samuel Beckett and shit.” Still, the class unlocked something for him. After graduating college with a degree in English and theater, he moved out to Atlanta—not because he particularly wanted to, but because he had two pals who were starting a production company and not much else to do besides join them.
From there, he “started auditioning like a fucking madman,” nabbing “day player stuff” on network TV, short films, student films, you name it. “I kind of felt like a one-man traveling show,” he recalls, “just saying yes to everything.” He did this for three years, landing smaller roles in shinier productions like the Netflix drama Ozark and two movies based on popular YA novels, The Hate U Give and Love, Simon. But as soon as he left the South for Los Angeles in 2019, he got the call for Outer Banks, which brought him right back to the Carolinas.
“They called and said, ‘Can you move out to Charleston and shoot for the next five, six months?’” he remembers. “I was like holy shit, yes. I’d always contributed to a little sliver of stories, right? Never been part of the big picture. And so that was really exciting. It’s all I wanted. I was like, I want to be there from the beginning to end and be part of the process.” While he and his castmates were becoming famous during lockdown, they’d get together to watch a different show about a motley crew of seaside pals: MTV’s Jersey Shore, which Starkey describes as “the peak of American culture.”
“I fucking love Jersey Shore,” he says with a grin, though he can’t help but analyze it. “It’s all performative anyway. It’s like you’re not actually watching people, they’re leaning into a character and I think they’re brilliant at it. They understand their role and they play it really well.” Their group dynamic reminds him of his OBX castmates.
Last year brought an unexpected change, when an audition tape Starkey made for a different project landed in front of the star-making Italian director Luca Guadagnino, who was casting for Queer. Guadagnino consulted Craig, who was already attached to play Lee, about his instinct to cast Starkey as Eugene Allerton—a discharged American Navyman whom Lee encounters while wandering Mexico City’s bars in search of heroin and connection. After seeing Starkey’s tape, Craig relayed to Guadagnino the three words every actor wants to hear: “That’s the guy.”
“I liked Drew from the moment I met him,” Craig told me. “He’s such a wonderful, kind human being, and that was very obvious to me from the very start.”
Things started happening very fast after that. “I got a call from my team telling me that Luca Guadagnino wanted to have breakfast with me,” Starkey says. “I was like, what the fuck?” We both agree there’s no way that Luca Guadagnino ever pulled up the Netflix homepage and hit play on Outer Banks. The man himself confirmed this: “I had not seen Outer Banks nor knew that Drew was in it,” Guagadnino told me in an email. “I discovered that Drew made it and was a celebrity the day in which, leaving the studios after a day of work, I saw a thick crowd of fans holding banners with his name in front of the gates, screaming, ‘Drew, Drew, Drew!’”
(Craig, who similarly had zero prior knowledge of Outer Banks, saw the crowds, too: “There were a lot of people outside the studio every night lined up with big signs saying, ‘Hi Drew.’”)
Everything that happened next felt equally out of the blue. Before long, Starkey was in Rome—a city he’d never been to, in a country he’d never visited before—and commuting to set from an apartment right near the Pantheon. (Even though the film takes place in and around Mexico, they filmed at Rome’s Cinecittà Studios.) Starkey says he and Craig “just jumped into movement rehearsals with each other, and we just got to know each other really quickly.” He laughs. “Really, really quickly.”
At that initial breakfast meeting, Guadagnino was surprised Starkey “was much more built in his body than I expected.” This prompted a discussion of what Allerton might look like as a young former soldier in the 1950s, and Starkey—whom Guadagnino described as “cheeky and ironic and dedicated and smart and sophisticated”—worked hard to nail down the character’s mannerisms, behaviors, and gait. “The way in which Drew created the physicality is remarkable for me,” the director said.
“This was a movie magic type of film…I felt like I was stepping into old Hollywood,” Starkey says, which is exactly how it sounds when he describes it. “The process of collaborating with someone like Luca is incredibly freeing and funny and absurd. I trusted him completely. I trusted his viewpoint. I would do anything he would say.”
The whole experience—it trips him up to think about. On set, he’ll still worry about fucking things up: “It’s always a shock and surprise to me that someone’s like, ‘Oh, that’s right. That’s what we want.’ I’m like, really?” And the thing is, once you make it as an actor in Hollywood, you get offered roles rather than have to audition for them—another element of fame that really freaks him out. “It’s more nerve-wracking walking into something and being like, ‘All right, first day. Let’s see if I’m doing it right,’” he says. “I would much rather have an audition process and have someone tell me, ‘No, you’re not it,’ than scoop the process.”
Queer shares its key themes—queerness, longing—with Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name, the 2017 movie that launched the career of Timothée Chalamet, who quickly became the avatar for Hollywood’s next generation of leading men. It’s a group that Starkey is currently poised to join, and he wouldn’t be the first among them to have gotten his start on a soapy series, either: Austin Butler jumped from Disney to play the love interest of a young Carrie Bradshaw on The CW’s short-lived Sex and the City prequel. May December breakout Charles Melton spent six mind-bending seasons on Riverdale. Jacob Elordi, who found instant fame and subsequent misery thanks to Netflix’s teen rom-com The Kissing Booth, is still mired in the potential-fourth-season limbo of HBO’s high-school hellscape Euphoria.
Starkey’s aware of how sticky this can be—the contemporary actor’s dilemma of moving beyond the gig that got him his devoted, hyper-online fanbase. “I was talking with [co-star] Rudy [Pankow] about it in the past, of learning how to embrace it,” he says. “The show or this character that you’re playing is going to be with you for the rest of your life. People will always associate you with that. And you could either really fight that or get to know it and embrace it.”
In January, Starkey participated in an important Guadagnino initiation ritual: sitting in the front row at the Loewe menswear show in Paris, not far from the director and his other muses in attendance like Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist of Challengers, and Taylor Russell, who starred alongside Chalamet in Bones and All. (Loewe designer Jonathan Anderson, a frequent Guadagnino collaborator, created the costumes for Queer as well as that Carrie hoodie that Starkey is wearing during our interview.) Consider it an ushering in, or at least a prime opportunity for an internet boyfriend in the making.
This ride’s already taken Starkey places he never imagined he’d go: fashion weeks abroad, filming in Italy, Serbia, Barbados, Morocco. “I never traveled as a kid,” he tells me. “I never went anywhere. I just stayed in my hometown.” But then again, the timing feels right: “If this was my story in my early 20s, I don’t think I would handle it very well. I was a bit too wild. I was a train wreck…I feel like I would probably self-destruct in some way.”
When our check hits the bar, a mother and two teenage girls approach for a photo: Are you Drew? These girls are huge fans of yours. The mother and daughter are visiting, and the other is their Italian exchange student. Italy! “No way,” Starkey tells them. He was just there.