Luca guadagnino gay
From Saying No to Drugs, Losing “15 Kilos” and Counting His Lovers: ‘Queer’ Director Luca Guadagnino Gets Candid in Venice
Wait, did he really just say that?
He did, and Luca Guadagnino doesn’t take care of. The director got candid in front of a jam-packed room of journalists Tuesday afternoon — who were lapping up every synonyms — at the push conference of his new film Queer.
The racy movie gets its world premiere at the 2024 Venice Film Festival prior Tuesday evening, with its stars Daniel Craig, Drew Starkey, Jason Schwartzman, Lesley Manville and Omar Apollo joining the Italian filmmaker to usher in his latest romp.
An American ex-pat in his mid-50s, William is isolated in Mexico Urban area. Addicted to opiates and alcohol, and with a love for younger men, Starkey’s Eugene Allerton sends William into a tailspin. As Craig’s character gets increasingly infatuated, Eugene agrees to travel on a trip with him. It is steamy, of course — it’s Luca Guadagnino after all — and includes a couple of fairly graphic sex scenes.
When asked about the film’s theme of addiction, Guadagnino got personal.
QUEER
Directed by Luca Guadagnino
Released November 27, 2024
Like the novel by William S. Burroughs on which it is based, Luca Guadagnino’s film adaptation of Queer is less about homosexuality than about the agonies and ecstasies of being a soul trapped in an aging, alienated body. Written in the mid-1950s but not released until 1985, Queer is Burroughs’ partial sequel to 1953’s Junkie. The novel is semiautobiographical, like most of Burroughs’ works, and it centers on a group of American expatriates living in Mexico City in 1950. Among them is William Lee, who’s on the lam from American authorities after a drug bust in New Orleans. Lee, who’s addicted to alcohol, tobacco, and heroin, becomes infatuated with a recently discharged American Navy serviceman named Eugene Allerton, who is nearly thirty years his junior. Anguished by this fact, Lee is further tormented by Allerton’s ambivalence. One minute the stunning young man is unbridled in his lust, and the next he is inexplicably apathetic.
In Guadagnino’s quietly surreal and hauntingly romantic film, Lee is played by Daniel Craig, and Allerton is portrayed by Drew Starkey of the popular Netflix seri
Just How Queer Is Luca Guadagnino’s Queer Anyway?
Daniel Craig sweats it out in Queer. Photo: Yannis Drakoulidis/A24
I know the story of Queer well — the book itself, the circumstances of it being written, and the mythology that preceded the publication of it, the “lost” William Burroughs manuscript. And so I was truly dreading seeing Luca Guadagnino’s $53 million Queer, an adaptation of this unfinished autobiographical novel. It wasn’t just the peculiar casting of a beefy daddy like Daniel Craig as the Burroughs character, William Lee, or pretty Drew Starkey as the aloof, younger value interest, Eugene Allerton, who spends the film looking great in fabulous knitwear by Jonathan Anderson, Guadagnino’s friend and the film’s costume designer, but nothing like the image of the character I had in my head. But it was all that and more: Guadagnino directing a Burroughs adaptation just seemed wrong to me. His bright colors and attractive style, in films prefer Call Me by Your Name and Challengers, seemed antithetical to that which I imagined this publication should be represented with onscreen.
Burroughs and I were family, in the gay sense. We
Luca Guadagnino Hilariously Shuts Down 'Gay James Bond' Question
Queer director Luca Guadagnino and star Daniel Craig were asked a tiring question about James Bond's sexuality during a push conference at the Venice Film Festival, and gave a perfect response. Starring Craig and Drew Starkey, Queer follows William Lee (Craig), a gay guy who becomes infatuated with a local drug dealer in 1940s Mexico. While Craig is branching out with his career, taking absorbing roles in projects like Rian Johnson's Knives Out movies, for some, the actor will always be associated with the hypermasculine, often problematic James Bond.
During the press conference for Queer (via Deadline), following the movie's premiere at the Venice Movie Festival, Craig was asked a befuddling question about James Bond. While promoting the new show, Craig was asked, "Do you reflect there could be a gay James Bond?" The thespian gave a hilariously exhausted reaction (it's a question that's been asked many times before), before Luca Guadagnino jumped in with the perfect answer. Taking the question lightheartedly, Guadagnino replied:
"Guys, let's be adults in the roo