While it was I who wrote ‘Junky’, I felt that I was being written in ‘Queer’,” William S. Burroughs reflected in 1985, when his novella was finally published some 33 years after it was written. A bracing, unfiltered, semi-autobiographical work inspired by his complex relationship with Adelbert Lewis Marker (a waifish twentysomething he met in Mexico City) ‘Queer’ – a slim 119 pages – was originally intended as an extension to ‘Junky’, but after it was rejected due to the explicit homosexual content, Burroughs lost interest. Even now ‘Queer’ has not achieved the fame of ‘Naked Lunch’ or ‘Junky’; a great shame, as its restless melancholy and transactional tenderness leave a mark on the soul like a brand, red and raw.

One person forever changed by Burroughs’ confessional account of desire and addiction was Luca Guadagnino, who first read ‘Queer’ when he was 17. “My teenage self must have been compelled by the beautiful writing – the way in which he was finding a language to tell a love story that felt classic, but his point of view was everything,” reflects Guadagnino, lounging on a sofa in a Claridge’s hotel room on a bright October afternoon. “I read everything in the Burroughs canon after that, which solidified my passion for ‘Queer’, because in that it felt like he was making love to the desire for a confession that he had inside himself, whereas in ‘Naked Lunch’ Burroughs becomes more guarded when it comes to him as a person.”

‘Queer’ stayed with Guadagnino. There was an attempted adaptation of the book in 2011 by Steve Buscemi that never came to fruition; the rights remained with the Burroughs estate. It wasn’t until the summer of 2022, while directing his tennis love triangle dramedy Challengers with screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes, that Guadagnino realised the timing was just right. “I said to him, ‘Listen, there’s this book I’ve wanted to make into a movie forever. Would you like to read it?’”

Guadagnino recalls with a smile. “I gave him the book in the morning, and by the evening, we were talking about it, and that conversation was very inspiring. I find Justin’s ambition inspiring – it’s not ambition to be famous or rich, but ambition to make beautiful things.”

The pair secured the rights to ‘Queer’, and as Kuritzkes began working on the script, Guadagnino set his sights on casting. But who could play an iconoclast like William Lee, so nakedly an avatar for Burroughs himself? In Guadagnino’s mind, it always had to be Daniel Craig, who was elated at the prospect. “I was already such a huge fan of his,” Craig explains over Zoom, in between wrangling his family’s new kittens into their carriers for a vet appointment. “We’d wanted to work together for many years. And when I read Justin’s script, I just saw within the character somebody who I kind of thought I recognised and I thought was incredibly interesting and complicated.” Although William Lee might share the loquacious drawl, inquisitive streak and queerness of Detective Benoit Blanc, Craig’s most famous role after Bond, the similarities end there.

In both Burroughs’ and Guadagnino’s versions of Queer, Lee is a shifty, philandering writer, laying low in Mexico and spending his time drinking, shooting heroin, or chancing it with whoever he can talk into bed. He is charismatic with an undercurrent of seediness, but mostly Lee is lonely – desperately reaching out in the sticky darkness, hoping someone might reach back.

That someone arrives in the form of Eugene Allerton, a young ex-serviceman and recent transfer to Mexico City, lithe and bright and completely enigmatic, who always holds Lee at a tantalising distance. He’s played by Drew Starkey, hitherto known to legions of teenagers as part of the Netflix adventure drama series, Outer Banks, where he plays a drug addict with anger issues. Allerton couldn’t be more different; a coquettish study in silences, he is a beguiling foil to Lee, who is smitten from the moment he first lays eyes on him. “Daniel I wanted, and Daniel I got,” Guadagnino recalls, “It was a long casting process to find Allerton. But I was in London two years ago, for Bones and All, and I watched a tape of Drew for another movie, and I thought he was great. I wanted him for Allerton immediately.”

Like Craig, Starkey was already an admirer of Guadagnino. “There’s something about my generation that strikes a chord. He leads with some type of truth,” he muses, in a room down the hall from the director, ahead of Queer’s UK premiere. Starkey has just asked me – politely, apologetically – if he can eat his lunch (an omelette) while we talk. “There’s this naked honesty that’s showing on screen, and I think with American film culture, that was lacking for so long. And I love the sense of reverie with his films,” Starkey adds. “It’s like watching a memory.”

With the heart and soul of Queer in place, Guadagnino rounded out the cast with his “dear friend” Leslie Manville, playing Doctor Cotter (a male role in the novel), an ayahuasca expert Lee and Allerton seek out in the depths of the Ecuadorian jungle, and Jason Schwartzman as Lee’s hapless, hilarious associate Joe Guidry. Starkey was star-struck, particularly by Schwartzman, who proved a balm for his nerves about his biggest role to date. “I’m on set and I’m riddled with anxiety. And he comes in the same way,” Starkey recalls brightly. “He also has
his insecurities, but he’s so excited to be there.”

But Allerton’s taciturn nature, combined with the reality that we only ever see him through the prism of Lee, provided a challenge to Starkey. How does one portray a man who exists through the lens of another? He levels with me, with a wry smile: “There’s always a sense of, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing and I don’t know who this person is,’ but Eugene was a much tougher code to crack. I watched a lot of movies for inspiration – Body Heat, Paris, Texas, some Fellini, Beau Travail… Sweaty movies. But really, it didn’t start to come together until the table read.”

If Starkey was worried about finding a way into Allerton, the pressure of going up against a pro like Daniel Craig never showed to the man himself. “Playing opposite him made things very easy,” Craig notes. “He’s incredibly hard-working and dedicated, but also has this lightness to him – on set you have to be able to remain as inventive and creative as possible, and open yourself up to what’s going on around you. Drew absolutely does that.”

And how does one get a grasp on a character as slippery and self-aggrandising as William Lee, an adept actor himself? “My key was Burroughs,” Craig explains. “What I found really fascinating was watching William Burroughs in interviews, this sort of façade that he had as a literary person and very serious,and then I’d see bits of footage occasionally that you get, which were more private moments of him relaxing at home, being high,in company with people. Those two things were my way in.”

Guadagnino is elusive about his own collaborative instincts. “Creative processes should be kept secret,” he decides grandly. “When I went to the Kubrick exhibition, I was so disappointed, because one of the last rooms is for the star child [from 2001: A Space Odyssey, which is referenced in Queer] and there is this plastic puppet, there in the nakedness of its own mortality, as a prop, and I thought, ‘Oh no, I cannot look at him like this, because my imagination will be perverted by this image when I watch the film.’ The magic of the movies should be kept as such.”

Magic is at the heart of Queer – and Burroughs’ work in general. His lifelong interest in the occult seeped into his writing, and Guadagnino translates this onto the screen via ghostly apparitions and a devastating final act, in which Lee envisions Allerton again, years after their revelatory trip to Ecuador. “I think fear eats the soul of Lee and Allerton,” Guadagnino reflects, referencing Fassbinder. “And the tragedy is the fear. For me, Queer is a love story – not a story of unrequited love, but a story of two characters being in love with each other at different times, and in different ways. The tragedy lies in those shifting moments. And certainly, in the line, ‘I’m not queer, I’m disembodied,’ which both Allerton and Lee say. Because at the end of the day, life is about the adherence between your self, your desires, your morality, your anguish and your body, and if you act them out together or if you repress all of this.”

Speaking of repression…Our conversation turns to David Cronenberg, who directed his own Burroughs adaptation, Naked Lunch, in 1991. Guadagnino is an admirer of Cronenberg’s, and has tried several times to cast him in a film. “The Fly is one of my top five movies of all time,” he enthuses. “It’s the most devastating love story ever made. It’s about what love makes you into.”

I mention the dichotomy between the warmth of his cinema, and the chilly, clinical strokes of Cronenberg. “It’s because he’s Canadian and I’m Sicilian,” Guadagnino grins. “But Cronenberg got it so right, in Naked Lunch,” he’s referring to the scene where Burroughs infamously kills his common-law wife, Joan Vollmer, during a drunken game of William Tell. “Burroughs shoots her, but Vollmer places the glass on her head. Why does she do that? It’s about unconscious desire. It’s about what love does to us.”

The gap between reality and fantasy is where so many of Luca Guadagnino’s films exist: the phantom of a hand on the small of your back; the feverish night terrors of a detoxing junkie. His films – which have their admirers and their detractors – exist in the fantastical realm. And for Starkey, whose ascent to stardom is just beginning, that translates into reality. He recalls a moment on set with Jason Schwartzman: “We were standing on this street that they built for Mexico City. It’s beautiful. And he kind of just looks over at me and he says, ‘Don’t you love this?’ And I was like, ‘What?’ Jason gestures all around, and says, ‘This! Look at where we’re at. Making movies! It’s incredible’.” Starkey laughs. “That little reminder… yeah, I do love this. This is magic.”