From 007 to ‘Queer’, Daniel Craig breaks the mould at Venice

VENICE: In a clear break from his James Bond past, Daniel Craig brought his latest role to the Venice Film Festival on Tuesday, playing a drug-addicted gay American in Luca Guadagnino’s new movie ‘Queer’.

The womanising of the debonair Bond is long gone as Craig’s character, often drunk and dishevelled, falls for a younger man in 1950s Mexico, with intimate love scenes between the two men that are likely to cause a buzz in the cinema world.

However, Craig, 56, said he wasn’t worried if the sometimes explicit sex sequences made headlines.

“I don’t think about it. No, I mean, what’s the point? You know, I can’t control it,” Craig told Reuters.

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Guadagnino, who won international recognition with his 2017 gay coming-of-age story ‘Call Me by Your Name’, said he hoped the public would look beyond the sex.

“I think Daniel has been so beautifully naked in terms of the soul in this movie that this is going to be the thing that people will connect with, no matter how naked he is on the screen,” the Italian director said.

Craig made five Bond films, the last, ‘No Time To Die’ coming out in 2021, but he said he had long hoped to work with Guadagnino, swapping the big-budget blockbuster for a small-scale indie production shot entirely in a Rome studio.

“I just wanted to work with him for so long. … I met him 20 years ago, yeah, nearly, yes, and we always said we’d work together eventually …, and we did,” he said.

Craig’s wife, the British actor Rachel Weisz, arrived with him in Venice and is expected to be on the red carpet later on Tuesday for the world premiere of ‘Queer’.

His character William Lee lives a solitary life in Mexico City, cruising the bars and knocking back hard liquor, before he becomes infatuated with a quiet bisexual, played by Drew Starkey, who joins the seedy U.S. expat community.

Craig said he and Starkey did movement and dance classes together to gain greater intimacy.

“It broke the ice with the two of us,” Craig said. “We worked very hard together and so we just sort of threw ourselves into it, into kind of, you know, into the whole thing.”

The film is based on an unfinished novel by the U.S. author William S. Burroughs, with Guadagnino and his screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes giving the story a conclusion, leading the two characters into the jungle in search of a hallucinogenic drug.

“It was a long time in the wishing. You know, I read the book when I was 18,” Guadagnino said, adding that he bought the rights to the work just two years ago.

“So something that was really a wish for 33 years became a movie that happened in six months.”

‘Queer’ is one of 21 movies competing for the prestigious Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival, which will be awarded on Sept. 7.