Daniel Craig Calls 'Queer' Sex Scenes With Drew Starkey a 'Great Icebreaker,' Wanted to Make It 'Fun'

Actors Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey approached their sex scenes with “fun” while filming the upcoming Luca Guadagnino-directed movie Queer.

On Tuesday (Sept. 3), the co-stars attended the Venice Film Festival, also where Craig spoke during a press conference about the intimate scenes. Currently competing for the Golden Lion award, the film is adapted from William S. Burroughs' 1985 novel of the same name. Craig plays an American expat in Queer who falls in love with a younger man (Starkey), a similar plot to Guadagnino's Call Me By Your Name.

"There's some choreography in the movie, which is a very important part of the movie. Drew and I started rehearsals on that months before we started filming," Craig, 53, told reporters about filming alongside Starkey, 30. "Dancing with someone is a great icebreaker."

"You know as well as I do, there's nothing intimate about filming a sex scene on a movie set. There's a room full of people watching you," he continued. "We just wanted to make it as touching and as real and as natural as we possibly could, and Drew is a wonderful, fantastic, beautiful actor to work with and we had a laugh. We tried to make it fun."

Craig also shared that he and Starkey got into "movement rehearsals pretty early on," although it wasn't just reserved for "intimate scenes." But on the topic of simulating sex, Craig said that he and Starkey "freed our bodies up and we felt open to try new things."

"When you're rolling around on the floor with someone the second day of knowing each other, I think that's a good way to get to know somebody," he said.

Musician Omar Apollo will also be in Queer and reportedly filmed a separate sex scene with Craig, which he revealed while in conversation with Starkey for Interview Magazine.

"I had a really cool experience with him … I remember asking him, ‘How do you feel when the camera’s on?’ And he said, ‘To be honest, every time the camera’s on me, I’m terrified,'” Apollo said. “I thought that was beautiful. You have to be vulnerable. You have to be open to these emotions. It was such an honest answer.”

The actors' comfortability with each other is considerably different from Academy Award winner Joaquin Phoenix, who abruptly left the production of an upcoming queer-themed Todd Haynes drama. According to a source, per Variety, Phoenix got "cold feet" about shooting queer love scenes.