‘Queer’ Trailer: Daniel Craig Seduces Drew Starkey in Luca Guadagnino’s Sexy and Surreal Gay Romance

The trailer for “Queer,” starring Daniel Craig and “Outer Banks” breakout Drew Starkey, has been released by A24. Helmed by “Challengers” and “Call Me By Your Name” director Luca Guadagnino from a screenplay by Justin Kuritzkes, the film is set for a theatrical release starting Nov. 27.

“Queer,” based on the semi-autobiographical novel by William Burroughs, is set in Mexico City during the 1940s and follows William Lee (Craig), an American expat living mostly in isolation among American college students and bar owners. He becomes infatuated with a discharged American Navy serviceman, Eugene Allerton (Starkey), a drug user who eventually becomes involved with Lee after initially being indifferent to his advances. Jason Schwartzman, Lesley Manville and Omar Apollo co-star.

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“Queer” had its world premiere at the Venice International Film Festival, where it competed for the Golden Lion. The film went on to screen the Toronto International Film Festival and the New York Film Festival.

Guadagnino has described “Queer” as “a very personal movie about the inescapable quest for being recognized in the gaze of another through the lens of the great William Burroughs.”

Variety film critic Owen Glieberman hailed “Queer” as “bold and trippy” in his Venice review and shared considerable praise for Craig: “Shifting about a dozen gears from James Bond, he doesn’t make the mistake of impersonating the older William Burroughs who became a punk icon in the ’80s: the dry voice, the beady-eyed stare of hostility. Craig gives us a pinch of that glowering Burroughs DNA, but the trick of his performance, which is bold and funny and alive, is that he’s playing the younger Burroughs (at the time, the author was around 40), before he’d passed through the looking glass of cultivated insanity to write his visionary novel of American chaos, “Naked Lunch.'”

Watch the “Queer” trailer below.