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
