“I’m Not Queer, I’m Disembodied”
- Luca Guadagnino’s touching film starring Daniel Craig, Drew Starkey & Omar Apollo captivates viewers
It feels the stars have to align for the culture to deem a movie great. The right cast, the right marketing roll-out, the right onscreen connections, the right costumes, the right environment on set. Too many things seem to have to go right. It’s almost cosmic to create a cultural impact with a film these days when attention spans are fleeting.
Few have been able to tap into each one of these aspects of a film so authentically that it has a palpable effect on viewers. Director and producer Luca Guadagnino aligns the stars perfectly once more with his adaptation of Queer starring Knives Out lead Daniel Craig who plays William Lee and everyone’s darling internet boyfriend Drew Starkey, who plays Eugene Allerton. In simple terms, the two main characters play each other’s love interest.
Guadagnino’s film, set in 1950 Mexico City, is adapted from William S. Burroughs' pioneering book “Queer.” In Queer, William Lee is an American expat in Mexico City spending his days almost entirely alone, except for a few contacts with other members of the small American community when he frequents local bars. Lee’s encounter with Eugene Allerton one evening, played by Starkey, who’s an expat former soldier, new to the city, shows Lee for the first time that it might be finally possible to establish an intimate connection with somebody. The film tells the emotional journey of Lee, who struggles with opioid addiction, (Craig) and Allerton’s (Starkey) romance as they face the quarrels of being a queer man in the “Fabulous Fifties.” From their encounters in Mexico City’s American expat community that are the foundation of their suppressed relationship to their vacations to navigating Panama City and Ecuador in search of Lee trying to experience the symptoms of ayahuasca serves as the focal point of the movie. The story of Lee in the book and film is somewhat autobiographical of the author Burroughs who struggled himself with addiction and coming to terms as a queer man in the 1950s.
To adapt Burroughs’ Queer is daunting and a huge responsibility as the film depicts the experience of queer men who are both navigating the internal and external oppressions they experience in a world that views them as subhuman. Only a director, such as Guadagnino, whose previous work spans the telling of queer stories from Call Me By Your Name to Challengers, could beautifully capture this story about William Lee and Eugene Alerton.
Guadagnino said in a press release shared with Our Era, “What struck me most was the strangeness of it — it’s the most accessible of his works, but what connected me to it was something I could feel within myself at the time: the idea of craving contact with somebody who reflects you, who you connect with on the deepest conceivable level.”
Guadagnino wanted Daniel Craig to play William Lee and Drew Starkey to play Eugen Allerton because both actors bring a beautiful fragility and complete shamelessness about themselves that allow all inhibitions to go into their characters.
When Craig and Starkey sat down with Our Era, Craig disclosed he would have worked with Guadagnino on any opportunity, but, to be able to work with him on this specific film, Craig felt incredibly gracious. He wanted to show viewers that Lee’s addiction doesn’t define him. His discomfort with who he is does; causing him to always look for an escape in something, someone or some place.
“It was an incredible opportunity to try and portray, to the best of my ability, a very complicated and messy, alive human being that William Lee was,” Craig said.
For Starkey it was a different path to playing Allerton. Starkey was initially not on Guadaganino’s radar to play Allerton, but when Executive Producer Peter Spears showed Guadagnino Starkey’s self-tapes for other films, such as The Hate U Give, Guadagnino decided to sit down with the young-actor during pre-production. Starkey had also been introduced to Guadagnino through close friend and the film's costume designer, Jonathan Anderson. Once they met it was apparent to Guadagnino that Starkey had something innate about being an actor that one cannot teach. Luca was drawn to Starkey because the actor found a connection in his soon-to-be role that was Allerton’s coy ambiguity.
“When I had my first conversation with Luca and heard how important the story was to him and saw how passionate [he was] about the story, it was hard to not want to come along for the ride with him,” Starkey said. “Reading about the emotional journey of these characters as well I felt this terrifying, but huge responsibility in a way that I had to let go of once filming started. I knew [their story] was going to be in good hands.”
Craig and Starkey’s ability to immerse themselves into their leading roles felt kismet. Their onscreen romance was palpable because according to the two the environment of working on the film was a place to focus and support each other in honing their skills as actors.
Everyday Starkey arrived on set, he said he was witnessing a master class on how to be an actor when working alongside Craig. Being in Rome with a cast and crew that had an endless curiosity for their work and a duty to their character's portrayal on screen was a lesson Starkey is grateful to have learned from Guadagnino and Craig. The environment Guadagnino created on set allowed him to dive deeper into Allerton and deliver a charismatic performance.
“Daniel is one of our best character actors in my mind. He can do anything, so it was nice to get a front row seat to that everyday on set,” Starkey said.
While Starkey applauds Craig’s work in this film and beyond, the Knives Out actor believes Starkey’s natural presence on screen is something you cannot teach. It’s innate; an actor either has it or they don’t.
“He's fiercely intelligent, and therefore is imbuing and informing everything he does with the work that you know he's put in. That's what comes across on the screen,” Craig said. “You know, to have to be able to maintain that through a whole movie and within a life, and keep it firing, and all of those things is a real talent.”
Their character’s onscreen romance felt intrinsic because Starkey and Craig were passionate about working with Guadagnino. For characters to fully come to life on-screen, as one sees with Starkey and Allerton and Craig and Lee, the cast needs to feel the story is in good hands. That comfortability and care oozing on set is what allowed Craig and Starkey to let go of who they are and go the distance emotionally and mentally to become their characters’ complicated selves.
While Queer depicts a very specific time and place, its themes - longing, loneliness, and the limits of what we can seek in another person; what they can do for us and what we must do for ourselves - remains universal.
Guadagnino created this movie because he sees what many may not in Burroughs’ work: a cantankerous, gun-toting, heroin-shooting, three-piece-suit wearing elderly hellion as the original punk.
When watching this film, one can piece together how this film was shot in a bright colored artificial set in Rome. The intention was never to hold production in Mexico City, Panama City and the jungle in Ecuador where the story takes place.
“In my mind, the images and sets for Queer had to be coming through the eyes and mind of Burroughs,” says Guadagnino. “Thirty years after I started thinking about the novel as a movie, I was still committed to the idea of recreating Mexico City, Panama City and Ecuador as if these were artificial places reflecting the anguish and desire and imagery of Burroughs’ source material,” Guadagnino said in a press note shared with Our Era.
Beyond the set, Queer required a psychological and ephemeral approach to costume design. Guadagnino tapped close friend and collaborator Jonathan Anderson of the eponymous label JW Anderson and creative director of Spanish luxury brand Loewe. Having worked with Anderson on his Challengers film, Gaudagnino could trust him to be the costume designer for this film as he’s familiar with Anderson's obsessive approach and encyclopedic knowledge of mid-century clothing in the 1940’s and 1950’s.
As the set reflected Burrough’s anguish and desire, the clothing worn by Craig and Starkey is emblematic of the story Guadagnino wants to tell about these characters. For the first two parts of the movie Lee has a certain undoneness to his clothing with his Hemingway silhouette. This contrast to Allerton’s uptight, refined and juvenile collegiate look creates a sort of sexual allure to him that captivates Lee upon laying eyes on Allerton for the first time. Their costumes highlight the two men’s stark incongruities - their age, their stations in life, their psychology.
In one of the film's most electrifying moments, Craig’s character Lee steps into the Mexico City night to Nirvana's “Come As You Are,” giving viewers a glimpse into how Craig and his character engage in the dialogue with the song. Music plays an intentional role in this film and all of Guadagnino’s prior projects. Musician Omar Apollo was cast in the film and created a soundtrack and music video, “TE MALDIGO” with the composers of the film Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross to further the film’s marketability as a cultural moment.
Guadagnino worked with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross to create the score for the film that was more subdued from their composition for Challengers. It was evocative and it mirrored the characters’ emotions allowing viewers to actually connect with the feelings the characters were expressing. It allowed an audience to be captivated by a world viewers may believe is so long ago–sexual oppression, shame, otherness–but many of these mental and emotional issues are still plaguing people.
When he sat down to speak with Our Era, Apollo felt the transition onto the big screen was seamless. It didn’t feel forced because Apollo has always felt that films, especially Guadagnino’s films, influence his music.
“The way that, you know, music is used, like Ryuichi Sakamoto, you know, we were both really big fans of him. That's kind of how [Guadagnino and I] connected, really was off of his music. So I'm a very image oriented artist. I like to look at images when I'm making music. I mean, Queer is a great example of how music pairs with imagery,” Apollo said.
Apollo is seen playing opposite Craig in a very intimate moment where Craig meets Apollo’s character at a bar late at night and the two men go back to an obscure hotel frequented by queer men to hook up, something common of 1950’s queer culture. Creating a liberating environment on set allowed Omar, much like Craig and Starkey, to focus on his role and become excited about the character he played. For Apollo, he felt acting was more about his expressions, being human and his sensuality which he felt was sometimes easier to perform than talking.
The liberation created on set is what queer people seek to obtain. There’s an oppressed feeling from both characters. Most times, it felt like Lee and Allerton were slightly cracking themselves open into who they were; always running to some place or to someone new. While the two men were able to open with one another at times, this film shows their personal struggles with being queer. Open queerness is a freedom that is priceless, but a price Lee and Allerton cannot afford. It’s this lack of freedom that many queer people experienced in the 20th century that creates a turmoil in them that leads them to feel that freedom through other means: seeking what others can offer.