The James Bond star caused a sensation at the Venice Film Festival on Tuesday with “Queer”, the new film from the director of “Call Me By Your Name” and “Challengers”.
Daniel Craig definitively buries 007’s alpha male in Queerby Luca Guadagnino, a gay rambling under alcohol and drugs inspired by William S. Burroughs and presented in competition at the Venice festival.
It’s time to play with glamorous sex symbols and gender stereotypes at the Mostra: after Nicole Kidman, filmed on all fours lapping up a cup of milk in a game of submission, in the erotic thriller Babygirl, it was another star, Daniel Craig, who played with his glossy image on Tuesday.
The athletically built 56-year-old actor is best known for his role as James Bond (Casino Royale, Heavy rain…). A character that he had already begun to distance himself from the macho canon in the last opus, Dying can waitwhere we saw him become a father.
Now freed from the role of 007, Daniel Craig completely reinvents himself in Queerin the running for the Golden Lion. He had dreamed for years of working with Luca Guadagnino, a 53-year-old Italian filmmaker who has become the darling of Hollywood since he propelled Timothée Chalamet with Call Me By Your Namewho by recruiting him confirms his aura. And has a field day playing with his image.
The film is inspired by the novel of the same title by William S. Burroughs, a literary figure of the Beat Generation, alongside his friends Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, mixing homosexuality, drugs and alcohol.
Hot sex scenes
Queer is a “very short” book but “full of emotion”: “It talks about love, loss, loneliness, desire, it talks about all of that,” Daniel Craig summed up in Venice.
Daniel Craig plays a middle-aged American drowning his boredom in Mezcal at a gay bar in post-war Mexico City. Through eye contact, casual conversation and carnal interludes, he falls in love with a young compatriot, played by Drew Starkey, 30, seen in the series Outer Banks.
Better known with a gun in his hand and a Bond girl at his side, Daniel Craig delivers here as never before in torrid sex scenes on screen, with Drew Starkey. The actor said he resorted to dancing to break the ice.
“You know as well as I do that there’s nothing intimate about shooting a sex scene. The room is full of people watching you,” he told reporters. “Drew and I started rehearsing months before we started shooting. (…) Dancing with someone is a great icebreaker.”
Filthy
With Queer“we just wanted to create something as touching and authentic and natural as possible,” said Daniel Craig, whose character is often shown dripping with sweat, in a filthy white suit.
A naturalness that does not prevent Luca Guadagnino from proposing, as usual, a very stylized universe, borrowing here from the photography of Edward Hopper, as well as from the atmosphere of Le Douanier Rousseau when the two characters go to the Amazon to taste a hallucinogenic plant, Ayahuasca.
The film is very carnal, like its predecessors, like Challengersreleased in the spring, with steamy scenes between Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist. This time with Daniel Craig, the filmmaker explained that he had “one of the very few iconic actors who agree to show their fragility.”
