Whisper it, however Drew Starkey appears higher on digital camera. However solely as a result of in Queer, his ayahuasca-fuelled romantic drama with Daniel Craig, Starkey is positively glowing. His trousers are pressed and immaculate. His options are mushy and dewy. A unfastened curl of hair dangles perilously off the sting of his scalp. He’s such a imaginative and prescient of fairly however seraphic masculinity that every one that’s lacking is a halo round his head.

“And I don’t appear like that in any respect,” the actor says at this time, with fun. The 31-year-old’s face is presently lit by the ceiling bulbs and flooring lamps of a five-star resort in London. It’s sufficient to verify that, sure, Starkey is extremely handsome, however not the sort of “candy holy Moses, I’m-going-to-doom-myself-to-a-life-of-sad-gay-pining-if-I-don’t-have-you” handsome that he embodies in Queer. There, Craig’s sozzled novelist William Lee – an analogue for the author of the movie’s supply materials, beatnic icon William S Burroughs – is totally enraptured by the great thing about Starkey’s Eugene Allerton, a pansexual hustler who drifts by means of the bars and cafés of Fifties Mexico Metropolis. He throws Lee into an existential disaster that spans a long time. And when Starkey first noticed the finished Queer this summer season on the Venice Movie Competition – the place it drew raves – he couldn’t assist however marvel at one key ingredient. He had been blessed with some very, excellent lighting.

“Our director of pictures, Sayombhu Mukdeeprom – he says he doesn’t mild for scenes, however for individuals,” Starkey explains. “And it’s true! He’s proper at your face with the sunshine metre continually. So in a approach, there’s a little bit of a disconnect once I watch the movie – it simply doesn’t appear like me up there.”

Should you’re a TikTok-scrolling younger’un between the ages of 14 and 20, the North Carolina-born Starkey is without doubt one of the largest stars on the planet proper now – a solid member on Netflix’s soapy teen smash Outer Banks, wherein he performs one in all its resident sun-kissed hunks. However for everyone else, it’ll be Queer that marks Starkey’s correct arrival. The movie, from Challengers and Name Me by Your Title director Luca Guadagnino, luxuriates in Starkey’s newness. Craig’s Lee virtually wilts in his presence, bodied by Allerton’s poise, youth and sexual ease, which solely appears to exacerbate his personal crumpled melancholy.

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Guadagnino sought Starkey out after seeing his audition tape for an unrelated venture. A single assembly later, Starkey had the Allerton function. He nonetheless doesn’t perceive the way it occurred. “I used to be riddled with anxiousness about all of it,” he says. “I had no concept what I used to be doing.” That Allerton is a principally summary character – he doesn’t say a ton, and is often seen completely by means of Lee’s eyes – solely made it that a lot trickier. However there’s a chic sort of confidence to Starkey’s efficiency within the movie, one thing as intimidating as it’s alluring. You perceive why a depleted and stressed man of a sure age would venture onto him complete universes.

“This has been the toughest factor I’ve ever needed to do,” Starkey says. “As an actor, I all the time wish to emote and go massive, and for this I needed to restrain myself lots. All of it got here right down to Luca, although, and simply having this willingness to offer your self over to him, and belief that even if you happen to really feel such as you’re doing little or no within the second, you’re doing one thing on digital camera.”

Starkey is eager to stress that he’s not totally new to all of this – he graduated from Western Carolina College with a theatre diploma in 2016, and had pottered round Los Angeles and Atlanta, Georgia, for a number of years earlier than Outer Banks, filming minor roles in teen movies akin to The Hate U Give, and showing briefly in TV collection together with Ozark. His success has been regular and incremental, and he needs to maintain it that approach. “You hear individuals saying ‘that is massive, that is large’, however I’m staying away from that noise as a lot as doable.”

It’s more durable to do in the intervening time. Starkey is on the centre of a press blitz and customarily exhausted, reclining lazily in a resort chair in unfastened, wide-leg trousers. He has a uneven haircut (gone is the curl that so besots Lee), and a silver hoop ring in his ear. He’s arrived in London straight from Los Angeles by the use of New York, Toronto and Venice, having been selling Queer and the brand new season of Outer Banks on the identical time. And with Craig unavailable for Queer’s London premiere, Starkey has to hold the majority of the movie’s UK press alone. “I want a trip,” he laughs.

That is the lifetime of the newly well-known, although. Sure, Starkey had Outer Banks, however it debuted in the course of the pandemic, that means he skilled the primary flushes of recognition whereas largely housebound. “I feel it was an excellent factor,” he says now. “It occurs lots, particularly with youthful actors, the place you get on a venture and unexpectedly you’re thrown into the world. So weirdly Covid helped ease me into consideration lots softer than it may have been in any other case. We had this security cushion.”

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Queer, alternatively, is a completely totally different beast. It’s not simply that it’s a Guadagnino film – Starkey’s function requires him to participate in plenty of surprisingly graphic intercourse scenes with the person many nonetheless see as 007. “I’m very pleased with these scenes,” Starkey says, proudly. “Earlier than we shot them, we talked about them lots, and what we wished to perform with them, and we have been all so snug with them. Working with Daniel, too, was really easy. It wasn’t a giant deal in any respect.”

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Does he ever fear about the place these scenes will find yourself, although? I point out that the actor Paul Mescal as soon as recalled being accosted by a girl on a hen do who had footage of his Regular Folks nude scenes on her cellphone. Starkey appears horrified. “I assume that’s what occurs now,” he says. “We dwell within the age of the web, and even scenes that aren’t intercourse scenes get taken out of context. The entire level of the love scenes in our film is that it’s these two characters having this deep emotional connection after which having this huge launch. That’s what makes these scenes lovely.”

He goes silent. “I imply, I’m not wanting ahead to individuals coming as much as me in bars and displaying me screenshots, that’s for positive. I hope that doesn’t occur. However I assume you do put your self on the market as an actor and persons are going to obtain your work in numerous methods. You simply can’t give it some thought an excessive amount of.”

There’s lots Starkey is raring to keep away from. “I’m attempting to maintain my skilled expectations at a standard stage,” he says. “In any other case I feel I’d go insane.” And that’s why a vacation is strictly what he wants proper now. “After this, I’m gonna go dwelling and take every week or two with my brother and simply f*** off someplace.”

He stifles a yawn, as if to hammer dwelling the purpose.

“All of that is unbelievable, however I additionally wish to be a human being for a second. I wish to dwell my life a little bit bit.”

‘Queer’ is in cinemas from 13 December