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.
