Daniel Craig says gay romance ‘Queer’ has everything he’d want in a role

VENICE - There seemed to be an unwarranted amount of shock at the Venice Film Festival on Tuesday, that Daniel Craig, portrayer of the suavest womanizer ever to grace cinema, would be interested in starring in Luca Guadagnino’s tender gay romance, “Queer.”

Has no one been to brownstone Brooklyn, where the most rugged James Bond ever and wife Rachel Weisz live in a townhouse once owned by author Martin Amis and are regularly spotted at school drop-off with their daughter? Many things grow in that liberal enclave of the borough, but homophobia generally is not one of them.

(That’s not the case at this festival, where Kyle Buchanan of the New York Times tweeted that loud boos could be heard in a press screening from a man muttering every time there was a gay sex scene - and there were many! - as if the title of the movie hadn’t advertised its subject content well enough.)

“The reason I did this movie is because of this great man right here,” said Craig, 56, turning to the “Challengers” director with great affection at a Tuesday news conference. “It’s the kind of film I want to see, I want to make, I want to be out there. … I don’t look at it as a challenge, just a joy.”

Guadagnino’s film is deeply personal. He read the short novel of the same name by William S. Burroughs as “a lonely boy in Palermo” and was struck by “the complete lack of judgmentalism in the way these characters were behaving,” the director said.

The film, like the novel, is set in mid-century Mexico, dreamy and saturated with color, where an aging Burroughs stand-in, William Lee (Craig), wiles away his days addicted to heroin and sweaty hookups with young men, all of whom seem to want something in return. Then, in the frenzied adrenaline rush of watching a cockfight, he locks eyes with a much younger, beguilingly opaque discharged Navy serviceman, Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey, perhaps best known for playing the unhinged main antagonist, Rafe Cameron, on Netflix’s “Outer Banks”).

For what seems like months, Lee pursues Allerton, taking him to dinners, clubs, the movies without ever quite confirming he’s queer. Even when their pent-up sexual tension is finally released, Lee still isn’t sure. As their journey continues to South America, and the two participate in an ayahuasca trip that reveals the depth of their connection, neither seem willing to give in to it.

Craig said he and Starkey started rehearsing their erotic scenes months before filming, and treated it like dance choreography. “There’s nothing intimate about filming a sex scene on a movie set. There’s a roomful of people watching you,” said Craig. “We just wanted to make it as touching and real and as natural as we possibly could, and he’s a wonderful, fantastic, beautiful actor to work with, and we just kind of had a laugh. We tried to make it fun.”

Starkey, 30, added: “When you’re rolling around on the floor with someone on the second day … that’s a good way of getting to know someone.”

Burroughs was well-known to be gay, but he seemed at odds with that identity or being part of the queer canon, once declaring, “I’ve never been gay a day in my life.” (He preferred the term “homosexual.”) Burroughs started to write “Queer” in the 1950s and then set it aside for decades before he was persuaded to publish it in 1985.

The director and his “Challengers” screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes added the intimate, unclothed ayahuasca segment, deep in the jungle, to allow the characters to explore what they thought was truly a love story, even if it was fleeting.

Then, an Australian reporter got up to ask “the obvious question,” as she called it, which was why Guadagnino cast James Bond in the role, and if Craig ever thought there would be a gay James Bond.

“Guys, let’s be adult in the room for a second,” Guadagnino said, throwing his hands up as the press room dissolved into laughter.

No one was being an adult.

“There is no way … [anybody] would ever know James Bond’s desires,” the director joked.

“The important thing is that he does his missions properly,” he added as Craig, already shaking with silent laughter, finally lost it. (Craig never answered the question.)

But why did Guadagnino choose the man known for playing a heterosexual icon for this part?

Craig is “one of the greatest actors,” said Guadagnino. But that greatness doesn’t involve monologues or going big and tragic. What makes him great, said the director, is his “capacity to be mortal on-screen, and very few are, and very few iconic, legendary actors allow that fragility to be seen.”

For his part, Craig said that fragility was what made him want, desperately, to do the movie.

“‘Queer’ is this emotional thump in a tiny book, and it is about love, but it’s about loss, it’s about loneliness, it’s about yearning, it’s about all of these things,” said Craig, assuaging any doubts that he was the right actor for the role. “And I mean, my God, if I was writing myself a part, and trying to tick off things that I wanted to do, this would fulfill all of them.”