In love, it can be terrifying to show all your cards, to make yourself vulnerable, to let your desire be fully seen. What is offered to another person without reservation can also be taken without recompense. Still, because we want to be loved, we risk it.
Maybe we don’t think much about that aspect of love, preferring to dwell – as most movies do – on all the moony, swoony parts. But that dangerous feeling of exposure is the central preoccupation of the new drama Queer, and it can’t be explored without a lead actor who is similarly willing to offer himself up.
Enter 56-year-old Daniel Craig, our erstwhile James Bond on a bold new assignment.
In Queer, which has just been released in the United States, a fortnight before it comes out in Ireland, and is adapted from a William S Burroughs novel, Craig plays Lee, an American expat in mid-century Mexico City who becomes enamoured of a coolly distant younger man, Allerton (Drew Starkey). Lee is undone by a desire that is reciprocated only in fits and starts, and watching Craig pine so vulnerably packs a pop-cultural punch: once considered the very face of masculine cool, his visage is now soaked in flop sweat.
Although his performance has been earning raves and Oscar chatter since Queer premiered at Venice International Film Festival, in September, it may surprise fans to see this side of Craig after watching him play a stoic secret agent for the better part of 15 years. But when I ask Luca Guadagnino, the film’s director, whether Queer is closer to his leading man’s actual sensibility than people might guess, he replies: “Every movie is a documentary about the actor playing the character.”
If that’s the case, maybe now is the perfect time to be reintroduced to Craig.
“Sometimes I find it very laughable, the idea of maleness,” he says. It is an early morning in October, and I have met Craig for breakfast at the Sunset Tower Hotel in West Hollywood to ponder the performance of masculinity. “Most men go through life with this act that they do,” he tells me. “But it is an act.”
In person, Craig is much more thoughtful than the endless grind of his James Bond press tours may have suggested: with two pairs of glasses tucked into his blue button-up and floppy blond bangs that fall frequently into his face, he has the affable air of a professor who got up early to go surfing. Self-deprecating to a fault, he apologises for being bleary-eyed. “If I’m looking a bit stoned,” he says, “I’m a little jet-lagged.”
Although Craig has a quiet focus and concentration, the only thing he treats with the utmost seriousness is his work: if everyone isn’t trying to make the best movie they can, then what’s the point? That driving force possessed him in his Bond days, too: “If anything ever dipped I was, like, hang on, whoa – this is the rarest air there is in moviemaking,” he says.
That all-in attitude also has a toll. “I find it really hard, this job, and it gets harder as I get older,” he says. Though there are plenty of movie stars who reach a certain summit of success, then begin to coast, Craig doesn’t consider himself one of them.
“Chapeau to that – if you can do it, great, but I just can’t,” he says. “I’m not a method actor, but I’m a nightmare to be with when I’m working. I want to go home and forget it all and just be normal and be, like, ‘Hey, family,’ but half my brain’s at work.”
Bond has given him the privilege to be more careful about choosing jobs, which means he is less prolific these days. “I’ve got a six-year-old at home,” says Craig, who is married to his fellow British actor Rachel Weisz, “and I don’t want to be away from home as much as I have in the past.” When he does commit, he doesn’t take it lightly, requiring months of runway beforehand to study up.
But all that preparation can take him only so far. To ready himself for Queer, Craig worked over and over with an acting coach, refining his accent and poring over old footage of Burroughs for insight and inspiration into his character. Even so, he found himself succumbing to nerves on the first day of filming.
“I’ve been working on the voice and doing all these things, but still, you’re just scared,” he says. After his very first take, Craig couldn’t keep it together any more: “I was shaking, literally shaking. Luca came up to me, and it was like he snapped his fingers. He said, ‘Just loosen it.’”
Suddenly, the carapace of the character – that fraught performance of masculinity – broke open, and Craig realised that in his quest to show Lee’s fragilities, his own had been on display instead. From that point forward he let the tension leak out of his shoulders and tried to take a page from his director, as Guadagnino was every bit as exacting as Craig while still able to project a more freewheeling vibe.
“And you know, I’m a tight-arsed Englishman,” Craig says with a grin.
Although Queer may seem like a radical new direction for Craig, in other ways it’s a homecoming. Before he was hired as Bond, Craig made his name in British indies such as Love Is the Devil and The Mother, sexually explicit films that required him to bare both body and soul.
“He has no shame in what he’s presenting as an actor,” says Starkey, who plays his Queer love interest. “He finds little intricacies of humanity that we all experience but are maybe too embarrassed to show, and he will wear it on his sleeve.”
Modern sex scenes can reveal character or simply revel in beauty, but rarely do they bring the feeling of need to the fore like Queer does. Among acquaintances at a bar, Lee preens and holds court, but when he is in his bedroom with Allerton – or with a hired hustler played by the singer Omar Apollo – need brings this imperious man to his knees.
“Sex is surrender,” Craig says matter-of-factly. “That’s what it really boils down to. That’s where real connection is made.”
Still, his greatest fear was that, without vulnerability underpinning all those sex scenes, the story could simply be reduced to “an old white guy walking around Mexico City” on the prowl for younger men, Craig says. “Of course there is lust involved – full-on, dirty lust – but it’s also someone looking for love at a time when everything must have been so complicated.”
He was just as ardent when it came to the film’s depiction of drug use, as Lee, like Burroughs, has spent years addicted to heroin. “I’ve known plenty of people with drug habits, and it’s not pretty,” Craig says.
All of that comes to a climax in a sequence filmed in one unbroken, four-minute take as Lee cooks and injects heroin while alone in his apartment. Presented simply and without adornment – for Lee, this is all as routine as breathing – the moment is nevertheless heartbreaking thanks to Craig’s candour.
“I was totally certain that scene had to play in real time, without any infringement of the fiction,” says Guadagnino, who brought in an on-set consultant and former drug addict to supervise the sequence. After watching Craig’s first take, Guadagnino said a hushed “cut” and turned to see the consultant shaking and in pain.
“He said to me, ‘This artist is rendering the experience of my life in four minutes,’” Guadagnino recalls. “Daniel made that gentleman feel so connected, hurt and, at the same time, elated. It was one of the great moments of my life.”
To hear Craig tell it, putting anything less than his full self on screen would have been dishonest. “I recognise the character in myself,” he says. “I recognise the pain, the longing, the yearning, the love, the difficulty and all the faults.”
How does he feel at the end of a shoot like that, which asks him to bare so much?
“I usually just get sick,” he says. “Your adrenals go; they just pop.” He jokes that his ego gets punctured, too: “You’re surrounded by people who were helping you out all the time, and it’s not like that at home. So you’ve got to come back to the real world.”
When he was trying to break through as a young British actor in the 1990s, Craig found his rough-and-tumble vibe to be a poor fit with the prevailing Merchant Ivory aesthetic. “I don’t think I was very good at being posh, because you had to affect the fringe and look like you went to Eton,” he says. Brushing a hand through his newly floppy fringe in a way that suggests Hugh Grant in his prime, Craig smirks. “Maybe I could do it now.”
Craig started growing his hair out for Queer, then let it get even longer for Wake Up Dead Man, the next instalment of the Knives Out franchise. The first big peek at his new look came in July, when Craig starred in an ad campaign for the fashion label Loewe. Boyishly styled in colourful sweaters, he exuded so much floppy-haired whimsy that the New York Times proclaimed he had “killed his James Bond dead”.
All the speculation about his new look has amused him. “Someone interviewed me the other day saying, ‘How long has it taken you to think up this brand change?’” he says. Craig acknowledges, though, that it’s a hairstyle he couldn’t have cultivated until recently.
“When you’re doing a Bond movie the last thing you want is somebody coming in and messing with your hair when you’re hanging off something.”
Three years after the release of his final James Bond entry, No Time to Die, Craig says the pressures of fame have lessened, allowing him to loosen up a bit. That has given him new perspective on just how much an artist in the spotlight can begin to withdraw from the world.
“I’ve had to examine myself a lot over the past 20 years to try and deal with it,” he says. “There was a time when I locked myself away. This is where the madness lies: You think, ‘I can’t go there because I’m so important.’”
Asked whether he has ever felt pressure to become more brand than actor, Craig wonders aloud, “Am I a brand? You have to do social media, and I can’t do that. I even regret emails I send.” Yet he concedes that if Queer had been offered to him 10 years ago he would have put his loyalty to the Bond brand first.
“I wouldn’t have done it,” he says. “I was so wrapped up in Bond and what that was, I would have been terrified of doing something like this.” He knows, too, that it might have been perceived as stunt casting: “Especially early on with Bond I was, like, ‘This is enough. Stay in my lane.’”
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Whether the movie shocks his fans or earns Craig his first Oscar nomination was never a top-of-mind concern, his costar says. “You won’t be able to operate as a performer or an artist or whatever if you’re constantly thinking about that,” says Starkey, who was inspired by Craig’s daring attitude. “He’s punk rock, counterculture to the core, and that’s refreshing to see and to work with. He has nothing holding him back.”
So maybe Guadagnino is right and Queer is a documentary about the man who stars in it, as both the movie and its lead are inclined to lay it all on the line. Or maybe the film is a mirror, Craig suggests.
“I know lots of tough men in this world who are vulnerable,” he says, “and I like to portray that in movies. That truth is interesting to me.” Maybe watching someone like him yearn with such self-abasement can startle you into wondering whether you do, too. – This article originally appeared in the New York Times
Queer is in cinemas from Friday, December 13th
