Queer’s Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey on playing gay roles as straight actors

Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey, the stars of Luca Guadagnino’s gay drama Queer, have weighed in on whether straight actors should play gay roles.

The upcoming film, which is set to arrive in UK cinemas on 13 December (27 November in the US), is based on the William S Burroughs’ semi-autobiographical 1986 novel and follows James Bond legend Daniel Craig as William Lee, a drunk and drugged-up US expat on the run in 1950s Mexico City. 

While on the prowl for his next lover, he spots handsome former serviceman Eugene Allerton (Love, Simon star Drew Starkey).

While Eugene is initially uninterested in William’s embarrassing advances, eventually he relents, and the pair embark on a messy, woozy and explicit romance that ends in a psychedelic dream sequence in the South American jungle.

While the film touches on hidden desires, isolation and the impact of drugs and drink, it’s the sex scenes that are grabbing the headlines and making waves on social media. Part of the reason for that is Craig and Starkey are straight men, playing very explicitly gay roles.

Speaking to Variety ahead of the film’s release, both stars shut down the suggestion that queer roles should be reserved for LGBTQ+ actors, with Craig saying that the film isn’t defined by the sexuality in it.

And Starkey said: “It wasn’t part of the audition process,” adding that Guadagnino “didn’t ask us the intricacies of our sexuality”.

Craig didn’t want to be seen as “dismissing” the conversation about whether gay roles should be played solely by gay actors, but said he trusted the Italian director’s vision.

“There’s kind of a trust in the director, and a trust in the process of what you know, and realising that the story has massive, universal themes that appeal hopefully to everybody,” he said.

“The movie’s not defined by that. I genuinely don’t think it is. Other people see it differently, that’s up to them.”

Starkey previously revealed exclusively to PinkNews that he had “no hesitation” about playing a queer character. Rather, he saw the role – and the opportunity to work with Craig – as a “blessing”.

Craig, meanwhile, has said he doesn’t feel it was his “responsibility” to represent the LGBTQ+ community. “I’m not sure that I can take on, I don’t think that’s my place. That’s too big a thing for anybody to take on,” he told the Associated Press last month.

While neither star had strong feelings about being involved in gay sex scenes, they did seem to be having a lot of fun with them, and Craig told Variety that the supposed semen seen on the screen came from a “secret recipe”.

He went on to say: “I think there may have been a lot more at one point, but it’s still there. It’s a little Easter egg.” And as to whether it was real, he said: “There’s a whole story attached to that. It’s a very, very secret recipe.”

This may be hard to, umm, swallow but Guadagnino revealed “sperm” filmed in the opening shot of the movie was edited out. “There was a shot of the sheets with the semen, we removed it,” he admitted. “But, of course, there’s a lot of semen in the movie.”

Queer is due in UK cinemas on 13 December and 27 November in the US.

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