Queer’s Drew Starkey on working with Luca Guadagnino and Daniel Craig and What’s Next

The film is released on November 27, and there is already talk of its Oscar potential. Meanwhile, Starkey, 31, has become the latest object of the fashion world’s lust, sitting front row at runway shows and appearing in an ad campaign for white-hot label Loewe, whose creative director, Jonathan Anderson, designed the costumes for Queer. He joins the ranks of other Loewe Boys, including Josh O’Connor, Mike Faist and Omar Apollo, who also appear in Queer. “It’s like a really dysfunctional family,” Starkey says with a laugh.

Sweater with V-neck from Prada.

With Queer and fourth season of Outer Banks and the fashion shows and the ad campaign and the screaming fans at the premieres in cities across the globe, Drew Starkey has stepped into the white-hot center of the zeitgeist. He is a man in demand.

Dinner with Starkey goes like this: One minute he’s glancing at the table, pausing to carefully consider his words, and the next he’s distracted by a passing labrador, then doing an impression of a German Shepherd, which Starkey actually pulls a blue Steel face and stares intently into the distance. In other words, it’s unpredictable – and wildly fun. We’re having such a good time on this windy Saturday night in October that our waiter at Mark Restaurant has to return to our patio table twice before we’re done with our drink orders. We end up ordering – Blanton’s on the rocks for Starkey, a glass of Arvine for me.

Starkey looks effortless in a Carhartt jacket, baggy jeans and black Sambas sneakers. His tightly cropped mullet shows a small silver ring puncturing his left ear. But he jokes that it is his “basic bitch” outfit. I tell him he would blend seamlessly into the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bushwick. “Oh, damn it!” he says. “I just need some American spirits.”

Sweater ($1,820), jeans ($2,060) and boots ($2,440) from Louis Vuitton Men’s.

About halfway through dinner, it hits me: Drew Starkey doesn’t know he’s a movie star.

Yes, he has that all-American leading man look – high cheekbones with a wide, easy grin. There are top notes of James Dean. But he is not aloof. There is an openness. He is eager to tell the story of his work. He is excited. It’s all refreshing.

It’s not hard to see why he is like that. Fame for him was no guarantee. “I knew I was going to work hard for it,” he says. As Starkey tells it, he comes from a family of “down-to-earth people” in North Carolina. His father is a college women’s basketball coach and his mother is a school counselor. Starkey graduated in 2016 from Western Carolina University—magna cum laude, no less—with a degree in theater and English because, as he jokes, “It’s good to have an English degree as a fallback.”

Open Gallery

Four years and some odd acting jobs later, he threw himself from working acting desks to the Netflix super hit Outer Bankswhere he plays the troubled, cocaine-addicted Rafe Cameron. From there to Queer was a quick and out-of-the-blue stylistic 180s.

Maybe it’s the English major in him, but he seems to light up when we talk about Queer‘s text. He wants to know if I’ve read the book and what I thought of it – for a few minutes it’s like a Burroughs book club. And he seems to have poured that deep reading of the text into his role. In the film, Starkey plays Eugene Allerton, the object of obsession for Craig’s William Lee. Starkey’s performance is one of raw ubiquity; even when he is not physically on screen, or when he appears across the room without a line of dialogue, the viewer can feel him in every movement.

“You know, we see so many love stories where the two people are so open with each other, and this is a love story where they’re not properly able to communicate that love,” he says. “It’s impossible. And maybe it would be possible in another time, in another place, another dimension, whatever it might be, but right there, right now, in Mexico City, in this part of life… it’s just not possible. It’s like they’re both looking around the corner, and it’s so heartbreaking.”

“Right from the beginning, a note I got (from Guadagnino) was that there is love under the surface of all this,” he adds. “There’s love there, so I led with it.”

This article appeared in the Winter 2024 issue of Esquire
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The word Starkey uses to describe the connection between Lee and Allerton is longing. The intangible yet tangible thread, all the love that lies unexpressed, just beneath the surface. “I mean, I remember watching the movie and thinking, ‘Come on. Come on!’ ” he says.

It is the scenes where the love is expressed physically that make people ask him questions – namely about the sex between him and Craig. Their intimacy is urgent and imbued with a certain desperation; Guadagnino leaves little to the imagination. Starkey is a good sport when I bring it up. Craig is “easy to work with,” he says with a smile. Still, he has grown weary of answering questions about this aspect of the film. He compares talking about it so often to writing a screenplay. At a certain point, the same old questions get the same old answers, and Starkey admits to editing his answer himself: Craig was a very rewarding stage partner; he took Craig’s lead both on and off screen; all that rolling around together felt like “interpretive jujitsu.”

“It’s like a round of phone with yourself,” he says.

All clothing, Starkey’s own.

To achieve this intimacy, Craig and Starkey had to get to know each other quickly. They were put through dance rehearsals to prepare for a scene where the two characters trip on ayahuasca in a South American jungle and roll around in dirt and coffee grounds (which triggered an allergic reaction in Starkey). I ask Starkey if he tried ayahuasca in anticipation of the scene. He says he hasn’t – yet. But maybe one day, under the right circumstances, when it’s time to “face his demons.” The choreographers had a word for all these movements, which was like poetry, according to Starkey. He apologizes when I ask what the word was. He wants to keep it to himself and gets shy when I ask why. “Because I don’t know, it feels like they’re for us.”

Later that night, Starkey mentions that he’s an overthinker, almost to the point that he had trouble being fully present in those moments with Craig and with Guadagnino. Starkey is a man who clearly feels deeply but seems to doubt his ability to do so. “I have that all the time in my life when I’m in a moment where there should be quote-unquote ‘feelings,'” he says. “Do I feel as deeply as I am capable of?”

It’s a rhetorical question, and I’m surprised—I’m even asking him to clarify—because Starkey seems to be feeling it all. He is a man who sticks to things, takes nothing for granted, and appreciates the moments and people who helped him get to this point. He expresses gratitude to his middle school theater teachers, whose names he still remembers. He tells me about his nervousness and disbelief during the first days of filming Queer. He shares a story about walking through Central Park at two in the morning with his brother years ago, sipping liquor from a brown paper bag, and how it all felt so uncomplicated. He understands his own position right now and he is grateful.

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Starkey doesn’t have much of a sweet tooth, but he does love ice cream and a good milkshake. I suggest profiteroles for dessert. His response ensures we order them: “What’s that? It sounds like medicine. Like, ‘Yeah, I’ll give you a 30-day supply of profiteroles.’ ” And his happy surprise when they come out is worth it: “What the hell, that’s crazy.”

Jacket ($6,790), shirt ($890), pants ($2,450), tie ($350) and tie clip ($490) by Valentino; sneakers ($65) by Skechers.

We’re the last table left outside, and even though he’s a self-proclaimed night owl, his jet lag from traveling between LA, Europe and New York is showing. Between bites of profiteroles, he stifles a yawn. When I ask if he’s tired, he quips, “No, it’s just my personality.” We’re talking about music. He grew up on Led Zeppelin, proclaims that “Jimmy Page is god,” and want to get Oasis tickets but don’t want to “be the guy to go through Liam or Noel” to get them, feared the Gallagher brothers would say – and this part is in a spot-on, thick Manchester -accent -“I don’t give one compartment who are you.”

He pulls up a video of a Kings of Leon performance from the early 2000s on his phone, which is pointless because he’s letting the universe tell him when it’s time to get a new one based on whether it goes in pieces or not. “They’re cool as hell,” he says. We’re talking about family—after this dinner, he’ll meet up with his brother and sister (the latter of whom he brought along to the photo shoot for this story). We’ll talk about what’s next.

Starkey insists he never wants to get too comfortable. “I’m in a place where this is uncharted water for me and I have some kind of control over what I do next,” he says. “I’ve always just been a working actor trying to find work. Maybe shit that scares me, maybe that’s what I want to do.”

If Queer is any indicator, the crap that scares him is the best kind – I can’t help but hope he finds himself terrified.

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Opening photos: Sweater ($390) by Guess USA; pants ($1,950) by Valentino; loafers ($1,200) by Prada; necklace ($220) by Noma; bracelet ($11,600) by Tiffany & Co.; Juste un Clou ring ($2,850) by Cartier; signet ring ($300) from Lagos.

Editor-in-Chief: Michael Sebastian
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