“This is my breakfast,” Drew Starkey proclaims as a plate of medium-rare steak and potatoes gets placed in front of him, a near-empty cup of black coffee to its side. He woke up at noon, coming off of a late-night screening of his new movie Queer, for his final day in Toronto. It’s the last meal the 30-year-old star will have before he flies home, taking a pause from the glamorous fall-festival circuit. He’s just walked the same Venice red carpet as Angelina Jolie and Nicole Kidman; he’s newly swept up into the A24 family. Things are moving fast. As he searches for a fork, it’s natural to wonder how he’s taking it all in.
The answer to that is hardly simple, in part because Starkey’s been on a journey of introspection since he was cast in Queer well over a year ago. An adaptation of William S. Burroughs’s semi-autobiographical 1985 novel, the film directed by Luca Guadagnino takes an elliptical approach to the story of a slippery romance between two men in mid-century Mexico City. Lee (Daniel Craig) becomes infatuated with a beautiful, enigmatic younger man named Allerton (Starkey), whose sexual proclivities prove maddeningly difficult to read. They become intimate—as captured by Guadagnino in explicit, passionate detail—and eventually travel both around South America and into the depths of their own subconscious (via a trippy ayahuasca sequence). One piece of dialogue, spoken at different points by both of them, haunts their courtship: “I’m not queer, I’m disembodied.”
Starkey references the line at one point over our meal. A feeling of disembodiment rushed up in him about as soon as he finished production on Queer, one of many reasons he’s still processing the film’s impact on him. Its professional impact may be clearer: The star of Netflix’s Outer Banks and teen films like Love, Simon reintroduces himself here with a rich, complex, and brave performance that ought to open new doors. But as we chat, he sounds more interested in the personal doors Allerton may have introduced him to.
At the film’s Toronto premiere the night before our interview, Starkey revealed on stage that Guadagnino first described Allerton to him as a “nasty bitch.” Naturally, we began there.
Vanity Fair: Let’s start with “nasty bitch.” How do you react when you get that description for your character?
Drew Starkey: Luca was being cheeky, but in earlier conversations we had, he talked about Allerton as cold and slippery and very hard to read—and Lee is always trying to put his finger on the pulse or define him in some way. He’s always just out of grasp or just out of reach. There’s a quote that Burroughs had in the original Queer from 1985, one of the last paragraphs. In the sentence, it says something to the effect of, “What happened to that knife called Allerton?” That image was always really an anchor for me. So, a nasty bitch. [Laughs]
You’ve talked about how you are still figuring him out.
I’m going to give you a Burroughs quote. For the last few days, I’ve had his quotes in mind.
Just for the last few days?
[Laughs] Well, the past year-and-a-half. But he was talking about writing Junkie versus writing Queer. He said that he felt like he was the one writing Junkie but he felt as if Queer was writing him. That kind of mirrored my experience in the filming of it. I felt like I did all my work, and I had to let Allerton lead me—which is so different from the way that I’ve worked in the past. It was a lot of meditating and letting things happen. But it was tough. It was really tough.
What does surrendering to the material feel like?
It feels like you’re holding onto a plane crash. You’re like, “I hope I survive this.” There’s an energy to it. Luca is a friend of Elton John’s, who was an incredible help in terms of the wardrobe and what he wears. So much of it was the image of Allerton, what Lee is drawn into and sucked into. That was really a lot of the focus: What’s the silhouette going to be here?
