Daniel Craig’s Masculine Constructs

In Daniel Craig’s new movie, he’s seen prowling around exotic environs wearing a white suit, drinking too much, and generally doing his best to go to bed with the sexiest visitors around. But the similarities with Craig’s most famous role end there. The movie is “Queer,” Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation of William S. Burroughs’s semi-autobiographical novella of the same name. Craig plays the Burroughs avatar, an American writer named Lee, as he cruises for much younger men in postwar Mexico City. (The movie was filmed in Italy, on sets that conjure an atmosphere that’s alternately seedy and gorgeous.)

Craig starred in the past five James Bond films, including, most recently, “No Time to Die,” in 2021. In the years since, he has pursued a variety of roles that seem to mark a conscious break from his Bondian image, whether cavorting around as a tweedy Southern-accented detective in Rian Johnson’s hit Netflix movie series, “Knives Out,” or playing Macbeth on Broadway. But his character in “Queer” is an especially sharp departure. The book, a 1985 sequel to Burroughs’s “Junkie,” centers on Lee’s romance with a young American, played in the film by Drew Starkey. The movie’s sex scenes are about as explicit as any that a major male star has performed onscreen with a male co-star.

Craig, who is now fifty-six, lives with his wife, the actress Rachel Weisz, and their young daughter. Both native Brits, they recently moved back to London after years in New York. Craig is known to be a forthright interview subject, once saying that he would rather “slash his wrists” than play 007 again. (He did another Bond film anyway.) More recently, he has said that he couldn’t care less who succeeds him in the franchise, though at other times he has seemed genuinely emotional about leaving the character behind. He even caused a bit of a stir for telling Variety this month that Netflix should do a longer big-screen release for the forthcoming “Knives Out” mystery, which is scheduled for next fall.

Craig and I met recently at the Chateau Marmont, in West Hollywood. He came dressed informally in baggy light-brown pants and a brown jacket. His hair was a bit shaggy, and he was unshaven. (Some of his very un-Bondian fashion choices, including in a recent ad campaign for the luxury designer Loewe, have been the subject of amused headlines in recent years.) We sat in the hotel’s lobby and had a late lunch. Craig is very informal in person—he appears to genuinely enjoy swearing—but he was focussed and thoughtful, never looking at his phone and giving no mind to two young women who sat close to us and occasionally giggled as they tried to eavesdrop.

In our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed his experiences making “Queer,” what he wanted to convey with the movie’s sex scenes, and his complicated relationship to James Bond.

How did this project get to you? Luca approached you?

Yeah, Luca came to me. I met him twenty years ago in Rome. I went to some kind of crazy actors’ party overlooking the Colosseum. He came and said hello. And I didn’t really know who he was, but he kind of talked about himself and we made some vague ideas. “It’ll be great. We should work together one day.” Like you do.

You guys all do that.

I mean, that’s what you do, isn’t it? You say, Yeah, sure, what a great idea. But, actually, it worked out. And I’ve been just watching his stuff over the years, thinking how great he is and how he pushes things.

Had you read Burroughs before?

I’d read “Junkie.” Here it’s a little different. I think if you go through a certain kind of university or whatever, college education, you hit Burroughs at some point. It’s a kind of rite-of-passage thing. I don't feel it’s like that in England. But I reread “Junkie” and I read “Queer,” which is, like, a ten-minute read. It was a really easy decision.

Did you study Burroughs’s life? It’s pretty crazy.

It is a crazy life. I mean, I went down the biography route and did that because I think you should. And they’re kind of fascinating. He was what we call, in England, a trust-fund kid.

We say that here, too.

You do? Right. O.K. So he was a kind of trust-fund kid. I mean, he wasn’t a very wealthy trust-fund kid, but he had an income, which is interesting to me in many ways, because it creates a certain type of person.

Say more.

In a sense it can take you both ways. You can become a completely redundant human being, or you can sort of use it and try to expand yourself. And it seems to me he just had a thirst for knowledge. He had really weird, out-there jobs. And then went to university, and then was in Austria, and then really travelled and did lots of things, and then got into drugs and wanted to expand his mind in that way. And as far as his sexuality is concerned, I’ve got no authority on it, but it seems to me kind of like sex and sexuality are not necessarily compatible. I mean, it depends.

I don’t know what you mean.

Well, in this sense that he got married. It was probably more likely that he felt he had to get married. I have no idea, but he probably was gay. And what that meant in the fifties—it was illegal. It was flat-out illegal, but so was being a junkie. So he was kind of an outsider in all ways.

What appealed to you about playing him?

I recognized him.

From people you knew?

Yeah. There is all this footage of him talking on TV shows or whatever, and there’s this voice he puts on, which is more “male.” And that felt like kind of an act, like he was putting that on to say, This is William Burroughs. This is who I am, a very serious literary human being. And then there would be bits of footage I’d catch of him being really off guard, maybe high, maybe whatever. I’m terrible at doing impersonations of people, so that wasn’t going to happen. I just wanted to find somebody that I could tune into. And I felt like I could tune into him because he was someone searching for love.

It felt like you were trying to play a character who was performing in a way, and not totally comfortable in his own skin.

For sure. And I am fascinated by the concept of masculinity, and how artificial it is and how constructed it is.

Do you think that you’re interested in that because you’ve always been interested in it, or because you played the most famous icon of masculinity ever?

No, I have always been interested in it. I would say one of my biggest reservations about playing [Bond] would be the construct of masculinity. It was often very laughable, but you can’t mock it and expect it to work. You have to buy into it.