Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey talk playing gay characters

Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey have spoken out about playing gay characters as straight actors for their new film Queer. 

The James Bond star, 56, and the Outer Banks actor, 31, are the latest to grace the front cover of Variety ahead of the film's release.

The film is based on William Burroughs' semi-autobiographical novella and stars Daniel as American expat and war veteran William Lee, who has a romance with a younger man, Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), a drug addict and discharged Navy serviceman. 

But speaking to Variety, the duo lifted the lid on their feelings towards portraying gay characters as straight men - after Daniel played serial womaniser Bond.   

'It wasn't part of the audition process—[director Luca Guadagnino] didn't ask us the intricacies of our sexuality,' Drew revealed.

In real life, both men are straight, with Daniel married to Rachel Weisz and Drew dating Odessa A'Zion.

Craig added: 'I'm not dismissing it, but I didn't really…There's kind of a trust in the director, and a trust in the process of what you know, and realising that the story has massive, universal themes that appeal hopefully to everybody. 

'The movie's not defined by that. I really, genuinely don't think it is. Other people see it differently—that's up to them.'

'I've been shooting sex on-screen since I did my short film 'Qui' when I was 22,' Luca added. '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. 

'Quality means making an audience surrender to what they are seeing,' he says, 'not judging, not feeling the fakeness of it, but believing it completely. 

The films sees some steamy scenes between Daniel and Drew, with the former saying: ''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. '

In response, Drew said: 'That's what I learned from you. There's no ego involved. I've never seen a freer actor.'

Daniel added: 'I've been in movies with terrible love scenes. It doesn't work. 

'You need a director who has a sensitivity, a director who understands, to—to put it crassly—make it real. That's one's job on the day: to make it as real as possible.'

The most recent trailer opens with Daniel Craig's character strolling through the streets of Mexico City at night.

He enters a cafe where he spots Allerton sitting near the window and the two men exchange a look. 

Daniel's character is then heard telling a friend: 'It was a wise old queen who told me I have a duty to live, to conquer hate with knowledge and sinceity and love. 

'The difficult is to convince someone else that he is really a part of you.'

The trailer then sees William and Allerton spending time together at the cinema and the beach before they appear to have sex and are also seen lying in bed. 

Daniel spoke about the love scenes in the film, telling the Venice Film Festival: 'We just wanted to make it as touching and as real and as natural as we could.'

Delegates at the film festival have professed surprise at the sex scenes which are like nothing hitherto seen in a mainstream film.