Soiled Sheets, 'No Rules' – 'Queer' Stars Talk about Sex Scenes, Erotic Imagery

The stars and director of "Queer" – "The year's most audacious love story," as Variety calls it – dove into the explicit details in a wide-ranging interview about the steamy gay flick that's based on a William S. Burroughs novel and brought to life by "Call Me By Your Name" director Luca Guadagnino, with a script by "Challengers" scribe Justin Kuritzkes.

Lead stars Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey covered the entertainment magazine, with their joint interview a centerpiece of the issue. One burning question that arose early: whether a shot of semen that had been included in the opening credits of an early cut remained intact.

Or, as Craig put it in a question to his co-star: "Is the sperm still in there?"

Guadagnino answered that question, noting that the opening credits as they are in the current version (headed for limited theatrical release later this month) no longer shows an image of semen-soaked sheets.

"But, of course," Guadagnino – who months ago promised the flick would contain many "scandalous" scenes of gay sex – went on to add, "there's a lot of semen in the movie."

Onscreen sex is nothing new or scary to Guadagnino. "I've been shooting sex on-screen since I did my short film 'Qui' when I was 22," the "Challengers" director told Variety, adding that the "quality" he's seeking comes down to "making an audience surrender to what they are seeing" and "not judging, not feeling the fakeness of it, but believing it completely." 

Discussing the film's erotic content further, Starkey recalled that while an intimacy coordinator was working with the actors, preparations for the sex scenes came down to "mostly conversations between me and Daniel and Luca. We'd all have a conversation about how we'd want it to feel – then just dive in." 

The director was evidently content to let the stars figure it out for themselves: Guadagnino "didn't ask us the intricacies of our sexuality" in auditions, Starkey noted.

Indeed, Guadagnino summarized it nicely when he declared to Variety that "Daniel and Drew knew that we had to show the love. And how can you show the love if not the behavior, from the way in which bodies interact, and their faces interact, and their saliva mixes?"

"There was a huge level of commitment from these incredible actors who are basically so happy to do what they love doing – perform!" 

"There's kind of a trust in the director, and a trust in the process of what you know, and realizing that the story has massive, universal themes that appeal hopefully to everybody," Craig weighed in. "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." 

"Craig, in his first film outside the James Bond and 'Knives Out' franchises in seven years, plays William Lee," Variety detailed of the film's plot. "On the run after a drug bust and enmeshed in a hard-drinking and edgy crowd at one of his regular watering holes, Lee encounters the beautiful and aloof Eugene Allerton (Starkey), with whom he comes to share both painful intimacies and, well ... substances that were once visible in the film's opening sequence."

The actors have spoken before about the "fun" they had filming those explicit scenes (there's evidently no swerving the camera away at critical moments, as happened in "Call Me By Your Name"), though they also have admitted to being "nervous" when it came time for those skin-to-skin cinematic passages.

Another featured actor – out pop singer Omar Apollo – commented on the veracity of the film's sex scenes, telling Variety, "I've been in the characters' world before."

Added Apollo: "You're in a hotel, the guy's sitting down ... I feel like I've been there before."

But, the stars emphasized, the film dives more than skin deep.

"At its very core, there's a deep love for each other," Starkey explained. "It's their souls, beyond language, beyond their bodies – and beyond Allerton's ability to communicate that."

"Thwarted by social taboos and by their own limitations, Lee and Allerton connect fleetingly but intensely," Variety added.

Craig interjected that when it comes to filming hot 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." 

Agreed Starkey: "There's no ego involved. I've never seen a freer actor," he added, referring to his co-star.

This isn't the first time Craig has played gay. Variety noted that the former 007 actor anchors a very different franchise to the one he dominated for 15 years, when he played James Bond in five action-packed films. As Benoit Blanc, the detective at the center of the "Knives Out" films – the third of which will be released next year – Craig plays a brilliant, married gay man who lets the drama settle where it belongs: in the murder mysteries he solves.

That glimpse into Benoit's private life came in the second "Knives Out" film, "Glass Onion," along with a brief appearance by Hugh Grant as Blanc's husband.

"We had discussions about not wanting to dig into it," mused Craig in his comments to Variety. "Because the classic idea of the detective is that they come from somewhere that we don't know.... So I didn't want it, but it was too tempting. Hugh will do it? Great! That forced the decision, really." 

But even before that, Craig depicted a gay man in the grip of an intense relationship when he teamed with Derek Jacobi for John Maybury's 1998 film "Love is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon" – a work that included among its memorable scenes a shot of Craig's well-hung character, George, in a bathtub.

It was that film that first drew Guadagnino's attention to Craig, Variety noted.

"He's one of the rare few actors and stars who can reclaim the word 'iconic,'" Guadagnino said of Craig. It sounds hyperbolic, but it may be true: The early word is that in "Queer," Craig gives the best performance of his long and varied career.

The Italian director has similarly glowing words for Starkey.

"I said to myself, 'Not only is this guy incredibly beautiful, I couldn't grasp whether he was acting or not,'" Guadagnino said of having been impressed by an audition tape Starkey made for a different project.

"It's not about drama," Guadagnino added. "It's about becoming." 

Watch the film's trailer below.