Photo by Tanguy Onakoy – © Tanguy Onakoy
Drew Starkey will be joining the cast of Luca Guadagnino’s upcoming Queer film, which will begin shooting at Rome’s Cinecittà Studios next month based on a screenplay by Jason Kurtizkes.
The 29-year-old Starkey will be playing the role of Allerton, a young man in Mexico City’s seedy underground who is being pursued by Lee, an older expatriate American, to be played by Daniel Craig.
Other actors who will appear in the film include Lesley Manville (Phantom Thread), Jason Schwartzman (Moonrise Kingdom), and Henry Zaga (Trinkets), according to Variety.
Starkey was acclaimed for his role as angst-ridden teenager Rafe Cameron in Netflix’s Outer Banks. His other film credits include include The Hate U Give, Just Mercy, The Devil All the Time, and Hellraiser.
Queer is based on the 1950s novel by William S. Burroughs that has long been a counter-cultural favorite for its frank depiction of sex and addiction.
The novel, which was not published until 1985, is a sequel to Burrough’s Junkie. In Queer, Allerton’s character is based on the real-life Adelbert Lewis Marker, an ex-sailor who had befriended Burroughs in the Mexican capital after his discharge from the Navy in the early Cold War era.
As Queer’s costume designer Jonathan Anderson recently told The Guardian: “It is one of my all-time favourite books. And the film has everything – Mexico, lots of drugs, and Daniel Craig.
” Craig had earlier played a gay character in the 1998 film Love Is The Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon. In that role, he appeared as the lover/muse of the noted British artist. He most recently played a queer detective in Rian Johnson’s murder mysteries Knives Out and Glass Onion.
Director Guadagnino garnered much critical praise for his 2017 film Call Me By Your Name, based on the novel by André Aciman, which explored the relationship between an adolescent boy and his professor/mentor in northern Italy. His most recent film, Bones and All, earned him a Best Director prize at the last Venice Film Festival.