NEW YORK – Daniel Craig is sitting in the restaurant of the Carlyle Hotel talking about how easy it can be to close yourself off to new experiences.
“We get older and maybe out of fear, we want to control the way we are in our lives. And I think it’s sort of the enemy of art,” Craig says. “You have to push against it. Whether you have success or not is irrelevant, but you have to try to push against it.”
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Craig, relaxed and unshaven, has the look of someone who has freed himself of a too snug tuxedo. Part of the abiding tension of his tenure as James Bond was this evident wrestling with the constraints that came along with it. Any such strains, though, would seem now to be completely out the window.
Since exiting that role, Craig, 56, has seemed eager to push himself in new directions. He performed “Macbeth” on Broadway. His drawling detective Benoit Blanc (“Halle Berry!”) stole the show in “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery.” And now, Craig gives arguably his most transformative performance as the William S. Burroughs avatar Lee in Luca Guadagnino’s tender tale of love and longing in postwar Mexico City, “Queer.”
Since the movie’s Venice Film Festival premiere, it’s been one of the fall’s most talked about performances — for its explicit sex scenes, for its vulnerability and for its extremely un-007-ness.
“The role, they say, must have been a challenge or ‘You’re so brave to do this,’” Craig said in a recent interview alongside Guadagnino. “I kind of go, ‘Eh, not really.’ It’s why I get up in the morning.”
In “Queer,” which A24 release Wednesday in theaters, Craig again plays a well-traveled, sharply dressed, cocktail-drinking man. But the similarities with his most famous role stop there. Lee is an American expat living in 1950s Mexico City where he, in sweaty, rumpled linen suits, cruises for younger men while juggling an increasingly debilitating drug habit. (No matter what you’ve heard, the most truly unexpected sight in “Queer” is Daniel Craig as an awkward suitor.)
Lee, though, is thunderstruck with infatuation for a poised and prim young man named Allerton (Drew Starkey). The film, adapted by “Challengers” screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes, proceeds as a love story but also as a profound romantic mystery.
Allerton is enigmatic and aloof, and it’s unclear how much he’s embraced his homosexuality. Their evolving relationship is a constant confusion to Lee. “Queer” becomes consumed not just with the question of their unsettled love, but of the tantalizing possibilities of liberation and the painful, long-term sacrifices of repression.
The film, classically filmed on soundstages in Rome’s Cinecittà, is populated with expansive windows and doorways that seem to ask: What doors to yourself, or to life, are you willing to walk through?
“Maybe another portal is his open chest. He just goes, ‘Please come in, come in,’” says Craig. “It applies to art. It applies to everything. Letting one's self go. If you don’t do it, how can you ever know? That tragedy of not doing that is greater than the embarrassment of doing it. We’re defined by those moments in our lives.”
‘I just recognized so many things within him’
“Queer” could be such a defining moment for Craig. For his performance, he’s widely expected to land his first Oscar nomination. For Guadagnino, making “Queer” is especially long in coming. He first read the book – written in the early ‘50s but, by Burroughs’ own wishes, not published until 1985 – when he was 17.
For years, Guadagnino, the Italian filmmaker of “Call Me By Your Name” and “Challengers,” contemplated “Queer” as a movie; he even once drafted his own script. In Lee, he saw a poetic figure.
“I’m really interested in the repression of others,” Guadagnino says. “I realize many, many times I go back to the theme. The idea of being so vulnerable and ready to be. He doesn’t have a sense of pride or a protection of social codes.”
While they were making “Challengers,” released earlier this year, Guadagnino approached Kuritzkes about adapting Burroughs’ novel. There were considerable hurdles. Burroughs never completely finished the novel, so the filmmakers resolved to finish it for him, writing into the movie an extended third-act ayahuasca trip. But adapting “Queer” also meant leaving room for its unspoken spaces.
“There is so much in the movie that is about the way Lee looks at Allerton and the way Allerton looks at him, and looks away,” says Kuritzkes. “A lot of that stuff is in the book, but when you’re making the movie, you realize the way Daniel’s face registers Drew’s face tells you what would be communicated in 15 pages of prose.”
‘Open to play'
Guadagnino, convinced Craig was right for the role, approached the actor with the script. In Craig, Guadagnino saw someone, he says, who was “open to play.” Within days, Craig, long an admirer of Guadagnino’s films, was in.
“I just recognized so many things within him,” Craig says. “Someone who is both repressed and open, and the complicated relationship with love.”
Though it inverts the presentation of masculinity many associate with Craig, Lee of “Queer” is more in line with some of the actor’s earlier work, like 1998’s “Love Is the Devil.” It’s worth noting, too, that Craig's other major post-Bond movie role, Benoit Blanc, is also gay. (Hugh Grant plays his subtly suggested partner.)
For “Queer,” there was extensive preparation, on accent and movement and Burroughs’ own tortured history. But after months of research, the characterization only really emerged once shooting began.
“I can’t tell you how nervous I was. It was terrifying,” Craig says. “But something clicked that day, the first day. And Luca said, ‘That’s it.’ I was very nervous to try to expose it, but it became a kind of unfolding of the character. I kind of introduced myself to him.”
“I think Daniel loves the camera in a way that is intimate,” adds Guadagnino. “Because he knows the camera cannot lie and you can’t lie to the camera. The love you feel from the camera, to me, is not the love of vanity. It’s the love of recording the truth.”
Starkey, the 31-year-old “Outer Banks” actor, was met with the very different challenge of playing a character with few words on the page and a cryptic presence. He theorized that Allerton is in retreat because it’s “as if you’ve lived your whole life and never seen your own reflection, and someone puts a mirror in front of your face.”
“A question I asked early on was: Is Allerton aware of the game that he’s playing? Is he aware that he may have some power over Lee, and does he like it?” says Starkey. “Luca’s answer to that was: ‘That’s a very good question.’”
Sex scenes in ‘Queer’ and the ‘salacious’ response
When “Queer” premiered in Venice, much of the reception focused on the film’s steamy sex scenes with Craig and Starkey. Guadagnino laments the temptation of the press to be “salacious.”
“They can’t help themselves,’ he says. “But we are practical people. People make love. People laugh. People sleep. People inject heroin."
“Our job is only to make that as truthful as possible, and not shy away from it, not be coy about it,” adds Craig.
“And can we just clear the table forever? When we were shooting the sex scenes it was so funny,” says Guadagnino. “We had fun. It was fun, light and then, done, let’s move on to the next.”
As intimately as Craig and Starkey would be working together, they decided to let their relationship unfold naturally.
“We didn’t, like, grab coffee and have a list of ice-breakers or something,” Starkey says. “We just started working. We jumped into movement rehearsals and that was a great way to learn how to be free with the other person. It never felt like there any walls up.”
Not having walls up was, in many ways, the abiding nature of “Queer.” And for Craig, it was one of the most rewarding experiences of his career. He and Guadagnino are already planning another film together.
“I don’t have any grand plan for my career. It’s been OK ’til now. It’s been going along,” Craig says, with a grin. “Then something comes along like this and you find a group of people to have this wonderful experience with. It makes me go: I want to keep acting. I never wanted to give up, but if I could get this again, I’d love to do it.”