Drew Starkey Joins Daniel Craig in Luca Guadagnino’s ‘Queer’
Luca Guadagnino is assembling the cast for his next film, an adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ Queer. Daniel Craig was tapped to star months ago, and now, as the filming start approaches, Drew Starkey will be playing the co-lead role.
Variety is reporting on Starkey joining the film, which is scheduled to begin shooting this month at Rome’s refurbished Cinecittà Studios. The film is set in Mexico City, and the story focuses on Craig as William Lee, an outcast American expatriate who, living in Mexico City, becomes madly infatuated with a younger man, Starkey’s Allerton. According to the trade, the cast will also include Lesley Manville, Jason Schwartzman, and Henry Zaga.
The premise of the book reads as follows:
“Set in Mexico City during the early fifties, ‘Queer’ follows William Lee’s hopeless pursuit of desire from bar to bar in the American expatriate scene. As Lee breaks down, the trademark Burroughsian voice emerges; a maniacal mix of self-lacerating humor and the Ugly American at his ugliest.
A haunting tale of possession and exorcism, ‘Queer’ is also a novel with a history of secrets, as this new edition reveals.”
Luca Guadagnino is coming off a critical success in last year’s Bones and All, and recently completed post-production on Challengers, a tennis-centered movie starring Zendaya, Josh O’Connor, and Mike Faist. Justin Kuritzkes wrote both Challengers and Queer. Early buzz around Challengers, which opens August 11, is excellent. World-renowned British designer Jonathan Anderson also worked on the Zendaya-starring film and will continue her collaboration with Guadagnino on Queer.
This will also be the first film since 2017 for Daniel Craig outside of the James Bond and Benoit Blanc characters. He started turning his career around looking for non-action films with Logan Lucky and later starring in Rian Johnson’s Knives Out movies — Glass Onion, the sequel to the 2019 critical and box office hit, premiered on Netflix last December. In between, he had his final hurrah as James Bond in 2021’s No Time to Die. A third Benoit Blanc film is also in the pipeline, though its status is completely unknown at this point.
Drew Starkey is a key player in Netflix’s Outer Banks, which just premiered its third season, though this will be his biggest film role yet. A release date has not been set, but we should expect Queer sometime in 2024.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as authors like Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
