After almost 15 years playing one of film’s most resolutely macho characters, James Bond star Daniel Craig was ready for a fresh challenge. After twice playing camp southern detective Benoit Blanc in the Knives Out film series, his latest role is in the film Queer, portraying an outcast American expat infatuated with a younger man.
Based on William S Burroughs’s early and deeply personal novel, Queer is set in 1940s Mexico City in an era when homosexuality was still criminalised throughout much of the world, and is an aching reflection on pain, longing, love and desire.
Daniel was instantly intrigued, knowing that – under the direction of Luca Guadagnino – this would be a love story unlike any he had depicted on screen.
“I recognised something in it that I thought I could get my head into, so it was a very simple decision. I told Luca that I thought this was a love story – and I still think this is a love story,” says Daniel, 56, explaining how he first met Luca at a party 20 years ago and had always wanted to work with him.
Understandably, he does not believe that he could have made Queer during the course of his five 007 movies. “It took a while before I did other jobs around Bond, and then I stopped doing it because I just didn’t have the head space,” says the actor, who plays William Lee, a man infatuated with Drew Starkey’s Eugene Allerton.
“And I feel like the longer I do this job, you’ve got to go where your heart goes and let that lead you.
© Getty“I’m very privileged to be in a position not to have to work as much as I used to, but if I do a job, I want it to be like this. I want it to be the best thing I can do.
“I wish I could say: ‘Yeah, I’ve got a game plan,’ but I’m making it up as I go along,” adds the Chester-born actor, speaking from Los Angeles.
Having appeared in many romantic films during his career, Daniel doesn’t see Queer as being any different.
“I suppose to be really in love, one has to surrender. I think that’s what real love is, at the end of the day,” he says. “And for me, that’s what Lee is really all about. “So, in a way, he led the way for me. We’ve all felt lost, we’ve all hopefully been in love, so those are things I can connect to very easily. But Lee is a very complicated human being.
© A24“God, give me complicated human beings to play all day long, you know?”
In common with Luca’s previous films Call Me By Your Name and Challengers, Queer features several erotic scenes that Daniel says were made effortless thanks to his co-star Drew.
“Thank God I had him to play opposite,” he says of the handsome actor. “When Drew came along, it was straight into rehearsals and rolling around on the floor doing these incredible moves, so we kind of broke the ice with that.
© Vittorio Zunino Celotto“I’ve shot some terrible love scenes in my career. They’re out there to see. Again, that sort of vulnerability, openness, surrender and keeping it as real as it possibly can [be]…
“Sex is wonderful and messy and complicated and all of those things. And hopefully we’ve managed to stick that on the screen, because that’s what happens in the bedroom.
“But hopefully it looks like two people who are into each other. That’s all you could ever want.”
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