Daniel Craig is guarding an unusual secret recipe.
While the actor, 56, sat down with his Queer costar Drew Starkey for a Variety interview about director Luca Guadagnino’s latest film, the actors discussed a visual image of sperm that was shown in the movie’s opening credits in an early version.
“See, that’s why you need to see the film again,” Craig said of the surprising imagery, which the outlet’s reporter wrote they did not notice. “I think there may have been a lot more at one point, but it’s still there. It’s a little Easter egg.”
“There’s a whole story attached to that,” Craig said, when asked if the substance seen onscreen is “authentic.” “It’s a very, very secret recipe,” he added.
Guadagnino, the Italian director behind Call Me By Your Name and Challengerslater clarified that the semen imagery was “removed” from the film’s opening credits, though it’s still visible in other scenes.
“They must have seen an early cut. There was a shot of the sheets with the semen,” the director explained. “But, of course, there’s a lot of semen in the movie.”
A24
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Queer is adapted from the 1985 novella by William S. Burroughs, which the author wrote as a spiritual sequel to his semi-autobiographical 1953 work Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict.
Guadagnino told Variety he does not find anything unusual about how his films approach sex and relationships.
“I’ve been shooting sex on-screen since I did my short film Who when I was 22. I always said to myself, if you start to give that scene a level of awareness or alarm, it’s going to become what it shouldn’t be,” Guadagnino said, adding, “Quality means making an audience surrender to what they are seeing, not judging, not feeling the fakeness of it, but believing it completely.”
Yannis Drakoulidis
When asked about the movie’s sex scenes, Starkey said he does not expect them to prove controversial once the movie is out.
“We can go on our phones and go on any website and see whatever you want,” he said, additionally stating that the movie “came from a loving place that’s so much deeper than abrupt images.”
Craig told Variety of filming the sex scenes, “You kind of have to leave your ego at the door. You’ve got to kind of just let it go. There are no rules.” Starkey added, “That’s what I learned from you. There’s no ego involved. I’ve never seen a freer actor.”
Queer is in select theaters Nov. 27.
