Whisper it, but Drew Starkey looks better on camera. But only because in Queer, his ayahuasca-fuelled romantic drama with Daniel Craig, Starkey is positively glowing. His trousers are pressed and immaculate. His features are soft and dewy. A loose curl of hair dangles perilously off the edge of his scalp. He is such a vision of pretty but seraphic masculinity that all that’s missing is a halo around his head.
“And I don’t look like that at all,” the actor says today, with a laugh. The 31-year-old’s face is currently lit by the ceiling bulbs and floor lamps of a five-star hotel in London. It’s enough to confirm that, yes, Starkey is incredibly good-looking, but not the kind of “sweet holy Moses, I’m-going-to-doom-myself-to-a-life-of-sad-gay-pining-if-I-don’t-have-you” good-looking that he embodies in Queer. There, Craig’s sozzled novelist William Lee – an analogue for the writer of the film’s source material, beatnic icon William S Burroughs – is completely enraptured by the beauty of Starkey’s Eugene Allerton, a pansexual hustler who drifts through the bars and cafés of Fifties Mexico City. He throws Lee into an existential crisis that spans decades. And when Starkey first saw the completed Queer this summer at the Venice Film Festival – where it drew raves – he couldn’t help but marvel at one key element. He had been blessed with some very, very good lighting.
“Our director of photography, Sayombhu Mukdeeprom – he says he doesn’t light for scenes, but for people,” Starkey explains. “And it’s true! He’s right at your face with the light metre constantly. So in a way, there’s a bit of a disconnect when I watch the film – it just doesn’t look like me up there.”
If you’re a TikTok-scrolling young’un between the ages of 14 and 20, the North Carolina-born Starkey is one of the biggest stars in the world right now – a cast member on Netflix’s soapy teen smash Outer Banks, in which he plays one of its resident sun-kissed hunks. But for everybody else, it’ll be Queer that marks Starkey’s proper arrival. The film, from Challengers and Call Me by Your Name director Luca Guadagnino, luxuriates in Starkey’s newness. Craig’s Lee practically wilts in his presence, bodied by Allerton’s poise, youth and sexual ease, which only seems to exacerbate his own crumpled melancholy.
Guadagnino sought Starkey out after seeing his audition tape for an unrelated project. A single meeting later, Starkey had the Allerton role. He still doesn’t understand how it happened. “I was riddled with anxiety about it all,” he says. “I had no idea what I was doing.” That Allerton is a mostly abstract character – he doesn’t say a ton, and is typically seen exclusively through Lee’s eyes – only made it that much trickier. But there’s an elegant kind of confidence to Starkey’s performance in the film, something as intimidating as it is alluring. You understand why a depleted and restless man of a certain age would project onto him entire universes.
“This has been the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do,” Starkey says. “As an actor, I always want to emote and go big, and for this I had to restrain myself a lot. It all came down to Luca, though, and just having this willingness to give yourself over to him, and trust that even if you feel like you’re doing very little in the moment, you’re doing something on camera.”
Starkey is keen to emphasise that he’s not entirely new to all of this – he graduated from Western Carolina University with a theatre degree in 2016, and had pottered around Los Angeles and Atlanta, Georgia, for several years before Outer Banks, filming minor roles in teen films such as The Hate U Give, and appearing briefly in TV series including Ozark. His success has been steady and incremental, and he wants to keep it that way. “You hear people saying ‘this is big, this is huge’, but I’m staying away from that noise as much as possible.”
The whole point of the love scenes in our movie is that it’s these two characters having this deep emotional connection and then having this enormous release. That’s what makes those scenes beautiful
It’s tougher to do at the moment. Starkey is at the centre of a press blitz and generally exhausted, reclining lazily in a hotel chair in loose, wide-leg trousers. He has a choppy haircut (gone is the curl that so besots Lee), and a silver hoop ring in his ear. He’s arrived in London straight from Los Angeles by way of New York, Toronto and Venice, having been promoting Queer and the new season of Outer Banks at the same time. And with Craig unavailable for Queer’s London premiere, Starkey has to carry the bulk of the film’s UK press alone. “I need a vacation,” he laughs.
This is the life of the newly famous, though. Yes, Starkey had Outer Banks, but it debuted during the pandemic, meaning he experienced the first flushes of recognition while largely housebound. “I think it was a good thing,” he says now. “It happens a lot, especially with younger actors, where you get on a project and all of a sudden you’re thrown into the world. So weirdly Covid helped ease me into attention a lot softer than it could have been otherwise. We had this safety cushion.”
Queer, on the other hand, is an entirely different beast. It’s not just that it’s a Guadagnino movie – Starkey’s role requires him to take part in a number of surprisingly graphic sex scenes with the man many still see as 007. “I’m very happy with those scenes,” Starkey says, proudly. “Before we shot them, we talked about them a lot, and what we wanted to accomplish with them, and we were all so comfortable with them. Working with Daniel, too, was so easy. It wasn’t a big deal at all.”
Does he ever worry about where those scenes will end up, though? I mention that the actor Paul Mescal once recalled being accosted by a woman on a hen do who had pictures of his Normal People nude scenes on her phone. Starkey looks horrified. “I guess that’s what happens now,” he says. “We live in the age of the internet, and even scenes that aren’t sex scenes get taken out of context. The whole point of the love scenes in our movie is that it’s these two characters having this deep emotional connection and then having this enormous release. That’s what makes those scenes beautiful.”
He goes silent. “I mean, I’m not looking forward to people coming up to me in bars and showing me screenshots, that’s for sure. I hope that doesn’t happen. But I guess you do put yourself out there as an actor and people are going to receive your work in different ways. You just can’t think about it too much.”
There’s a lot Starkey is eager to avoid. “I’m trying to keep my professional expectations at a normal level,” he says. “Otherwise I think I’d go insane.” And that’s why a holiday is exactly what he needs right now. “After this, I’m gonna go home and take a week or two with my brother and just f*** off somewhere.”
He stifles a yawn, as if to hammer home the point.
“All of this is incredible, but I also want to be a human being for a second. I want to live my life a little bit.”
‘Queer’ is in cinemas from 13 December
