Luca Guadagnino's new film "Queer" opens with a series of tableaux -- little still-life images of glasses, trinkets and books. The objects are meant to evoke the lives of its two lead characters, gay men seeking refuge from their pasts and leaning into their desires in 1950s Mexico City. It's an example, the film's stars Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey say, of Guadagnino's keen eye for how to evoke character through the material world. But it's apparently even more than that too.

"The opening credits?" Craig asks, sitting next to his co-star in a New York photo studio. "Is the sperm still in there?"

"I think so," Starkey says matter-of-factly.

We missed this visual, evidently. "See, that's why you need to see the film again," Craig remarks drolly. "I think there may have been a lot more at one point, but it's still there. It's a little Easter egg." As for whether it's, ahem, authentic -- "there's a whole story attached to that," Craig laughs. "It's a very, very secret recipe."

Later, speaking on a Zoom call from Milan, Guadagnino offers a fact check. "I don't think the semen is anymore in the opening credits. We removed it," he says. "They must have seen an early cut. There was a shot of the sheets with the semen. But, of course, there's a lot of semen in the movie."

Welcome to the world of "Queer." Guadagnino, who pushed tennis-as-sex metaphors to thrilling heights earlier this year with "Challengers" and gave the world Timothée Chalamet fornicating with a peach in 2017's "Call Me by Your Name," returns to the big screen with another big swing. "Queer" is based on Beat Generation writer William S. Burroughs' novella, published in 1985, which fictionalizes the author's own experiences of recreational heroin use and his sensual love affair with a discharged serviceman. (In the era the book and film depict, to be gay was perhaps the more dangerous of the two experiences.)

Craig, in his first film outside the James Bond and "Knives Out" franchises in seven years, plays William Lee. 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.

There are universal aspects to "Queer" -- the struggle to be truly vulnerable, the experience of falling in love and battles with insecurity. But a gay audience will likely find it particularly striking: It's a film that's utterly unafraid to depict both the literal fact of sexuality and the inner turmoil that leads many to use sex to escape. "I've been in the characters' world before," says the singer Omar Apollo, who plays one of Craig's other love interests (and who, unlike Craig and Starkey, is openly queer). "You're in a hotel, the guy's sitting down ... I feel like I've been there before."

The film's first cut came in at three and a half hours. "I'd love people to see it, because there's other things going on," Craig says. But even whittled down to a (relatively!) slight 135 minutes, "Queer" is capacious, making room both for a frank depiction of male sexuality and for touches of surrealistic fantasy. It's at once as direct a documentation of gay love as anything on-screen since 2005's "Brokeback Mountain" (pushing much farther even than Guadagnino's "Call Me by Your Name," which panned away from its key sex scene) and a joyful-yet-melancholy ayahuasca journey.

And it's a turning point for both of its leads. For Craig, post-Bond and in the middle of his run as "Knives Out" sleuth Benoit Blanc, it's a test of his star power. "Queer" isn't designed to be a blockbuster -- indeed, it's about as risky as a film can get. (A24, which picked up the title earlier this summer before film festival season, will give the movie a limited theatrical release on Nov. 27.) How many of Craig's fans -- and how many awards voters -- will join Craig on this trip? And for Starkey, it's an introduction: After showing promise as bad boy Rafe Cameron in Netflix's teen drama "Outer Banks," he gets the opportunity to share the screen with a movie star -- and to prove he can more than hold his own.

Together, the pair have crafted a love story every bit as distinctive as the Zendaya-led throuple in "Challengers." "At its very core, there's a deep love for each other," Starkey says. "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. The sex scenes that they share will likely unsettle Gen Z audiences, who have made clear that lovemaking in movies is better left off-screen.

"I don't know; I can't speak to that generation," Craig says when asked about a 2023 UCLA study indicating that young people are rejecting sex scenes in films.

"I don't know if that's true," Starkey says with a laugh. "Maybe it's because there's a much louder voice online."

Filming the love scenes for "Queer," Craig says, "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."

"That's what I learned from you," Starkey says. "There's no ego involved. I've never seen a freer actor."

Craig and Starkey are speaking in early October, the morning after the film premiered at the New York Film Festival. It was a packed screening topped off with an after-party downtown at the Chelsea Hotel. As if the venue weren't gay enough, literati from playwright Jeremy O. Harris to Evan Ross Katz -- the social-media-age Cindy Adams -- are in attendance to toast the film. In the downstairs ballroom, Guadagnino embraces his two co-stars, signifying their close relationship.

The Italian-born director brought the actors into his arms -- and home -- for "Queer"; though the film is set in Mexico, Craig and Starkey rehearsed and shot the movie together at Cinecittà, the famous studio in Rome where Fellini, Rossellini and Visconti all made classics. They're about a month removed from the film's premiere at the Venice International Film Festival, where it received a nine-minute standing ovation and, more crucially, launched Starkey as a viral sensation before most people had the chance to see the film. Posing on a gondola with Apollo and mugging for cameras on the red carpet, the 30-year-old actor emerged as the fest's breakout star.

"It's head-spinning," Starkey says. "I can't really make sense of it -- it all feels absurd. I'm just trying to remain very present and calm. I'm in a moment -- but the next year, it changes."

"I always say," Craig begins, then deflates the potential appearance of bluster by repeating the words in the pompous cadence of the stereotypically vain thespian. "I always say. It's tectonic, this business. It's not a ladder you climb up. Everything's lateral. I met Luca 20 years ago, and it's taken this long."

Lee's journey involves not only moments of connection; he also must admit to himself that he's more than just a social drinker. Indeed, the film's chilling undertow is the growing realization that Lee is, in fact, a heroin addict, and that he is medicating himself in part to hide from reality.

"Unfortunately," Craig says, "I've known people -- that's touched upon my life in certain ways. So I've seen him close-up." Craig spoke to an on-set expert to ensure authenticity in depicting addiction, but, he says, "we didn't want to make this a withdrawal movie. It just has to be part of the story." Lee is not exactly a secret addict. Yet the extent of his substance problems comes as something of a shock to Eugene. "I don't think he's hiding it," Craig says. "I just think he's a proud human being who's not showing it. He gets very messy in the movie, but he doesn't want to be that -- he wants to be dignified and elegant, poised."

Craig's work in "Queer" represents a bit of a break in routine, and possibly a return to his roots. Before emerging as an action star in "Layer Cake," Craig, a London theater-trained actor, gained notice in intimate and dark character dramas such as 2003's "Sylvia," in which he plays poet Ted Hughes opposite Gwyneth Paltrow's Sylvia Plath.

Now, though, he enters "Queer" as an actor who's known for two characters in huge movies who define elegance and poise. Since making Steven Soderbergh's "Logan Lucky" in 2017, Craig has filmed his final James Bond (definitively so, as his Bond ends in 2021's "No Time to Die" by, well, finding time to die) and appeared in three "Knives Out" mystery movies, with the third, "Wake Up Dead Man," coming via Netflix in 2025. Craig's cerebral investigator Benoit Blanc, it was revealed in 2022's "Glass Onion," is a gay man living a life as emotionally fulfilled and stable as Lee's is turbulent and tortured, with a domestic partner played by Hugh Grant in a glancing cameo.

"We had discussions about not wanting to dig into it," Craig says. "Because the classic idea of the detective is that they come from somewhere that we don't know. Columbo has a mystery wife we don't know -- and I think it's good that way. So I didn't want it, but it was too tempting. Hugh will do it? Great! That forced the decision, really."

"Glass Onion" was well positioned to be among the films, like that year's "Top Gun" and "Avatar" sequels, to welcome audiences back to multiplexes after the pandemic; the first "Knives Out," released by Lionsgate in 2019, made $312 million worldwide. But the streaming company limited its theatrical release to a single week.

Does Craig wish the next installment in his current signature franchise could play in theaters for more than a week? "You know I do," he says. "Hopefully, Netflix will push it out a bit, and people will get to see it. The people I speak to -- the fans, I suppose -- all they want to do is take their families and go see it at the cinemas. That's all they want to do. Hopefully we can give them that experience."

"'Glass Onion' had a release," Starkey says.

"Yeah, limited. But yeah." Craig sounds slightly clipped as he recalls the weeklong run.

"Oh, what?" Starkey says incredulously.

The younger actor is still learning the ropes of Hollywood -- and, indeed, nearly had his own reason to begrudge Netflix. After successfully auditioning for Guadagnino, Starkey ran into challenges, as he was contractually bound to "Outer Banks," whose producers initially declined his request to be released to shoot "Queer." Starkey's agents had to perform acrobatic feats of scheduling to accommodate both his teen-heartthrob role and his adult breakthrough.

"It was a tight window," Starkey chuckles. "But Luca kept saying, very emphatically, It'll happen. We'll make it work."

"Luca doesn't go over," Craig says. "He shoots very rapidly and finishes on time."

Guadagnino's career has been building up steam since the 2009 Tilda Swinton romance "I Am Love," and it was turbocharged with "Call Me by Your Name," which situated queer longing in the picturesque hills of Italy. But this year represents a Steven Soderbergh moment for Guadagnino, as all his momentum culminates in a double bill for the ages. In 2000, Soderbergh had Julia Roberts star vehicle "Erin Brockovich" and gritty drug-world drama "Traffic"; Guadagnino had Zendaya star vehicle "Challengers" in the spring (meant to be released last year, but fortuitously delayed to 2024 by the strikes) and gritty drug-world drama "Queer" in the winter. To top it off, Guadagnino went on to work with Roberts, filming the thriller "After the Hunt" in London over the summer. It comes out next year.

Guadagnino had wanted to make "Queer" for as long as he could remember. "I read the book when I was 17 -- I was lonely in Palermo, Sicily, and in a way, I was found by the book," the director says. From the earliest moments in his film career, Guadagnino made attempts to adapt Burroughs. "I was doing the wrong things," he says. "I was writing the script by myself. I was calling the publisher in America to check for the rights, and they were just laughing at me on the phone. I couldn't speak proper English at the time."

After what Guadagnino describes as "many, many false moves," lightning finally struck. Preparing to shoot "Challengers" in Boston in May 2022, Guadagnino realized that the film's screenwriter, Justin Kuritzkes, was a kindred creative spirit and gave him a copy of the novella. "He read it immediately," Guadagnino recalls, "and that evening we were talking about adapting it." Producer Lorenzo Mieli, a past collaborator, looked into the rights, and, in short order, Guadagnino's next project was set.

"It's been almost 30 years in the making, and then in three months, the movie got made," Guadagnino marvels. The moment he handed Kuritzkes the book to the moment cameras rolled took less than a year -- and the project's fast pace was aided by casting kismet.

Bryan Lourd, who represents both Guadagnino and Craig, suggested Craig for the role of Lee. Craig devoured the book in an evening. "I thought," he says, "This is a story about love -- about someone opening themself up to somebody else. And if Luca's into that idea ...? And that's what he hit me with as soon as we met: This is a story about love." Craig was ready to sign on.

For his part, Guadagnino -- who first met Craig some 20 years before, having been dazzled by the actor's performance in the tiny art film "Love Is the Devil"  -- was thrilled. "He's one of the rare few actors and stars who can reclaim the word 'iconic,'" Guadagnino says.

"We both agreed that this was a love story," Guadagnino continues. "It made me feel that we both came, strangely, from the same cloth -- a fabric that belongs to the same roll of textile."

And in keeping with his search for kindred spirits, Guadagnino runs his sets in an unusually collaborative way. "Two days into shooting," Craig recalls, "Drew's driver came up to me and said, The script is fantastic." Starkey laughs at the memory. "Luca gave him the script," Craig goes on. "That's his M.O. -- 'What do think? What do you think? What do you think?' He wants everybody's opinion. It's kind of freeing. It democratizes the process."

As the actors read the script aloud, Guadagnino circled them and considered where he might put the camera. Once filming began, though, he was clear and certain about what he wanted. Apollo, describing the love scene he shares with Craig, remarked, "Once he's got something -- boom, that was it. We would hear him screaming from the back. When we did the scene where Daniel grabs me and pulls me in, he screamed, 'Come on!'" Apollo, recalling the moment, sounds briefly like Zendaya at the end of "Challengers," who shouts, "Come on!" as she sees her two lovers finally embrace each other.

Guadagnino may be a collaborator, but he's also a star-maker. He was so certain he wanted Starkey for the role that, after an initial wobbly audition ("It was in a different color than he wanted," Starkey says), the director let him retape. "What a gift," Starkey says. "We never get that."

The director first came across Starkey in a self-taped audition for another movie entirely. "I said to myself, 'Not only is this guy incredibly beautiful, I couldn't grasp whether he was acting or not.' It's not about drama. It's about becoming."

The pair met twice in Los Angeles -- first alone and then with Jonathan Anderson, the in-demand fashion designer behind Loewe who also designed the costumes for "Challengers" and "Queer." "I immediately, completely knew this guy Starkey was going to be Eugene," Guadagnino says. "But for the sake of playing devil's advocate, I asked my casting director, Jessica Ronane, to do a casting on the character. I think we got 300 people taping, and none of them could really let us forget the incredible Drew."

"Drew was fantastic because he's such a natural," Anderson says in an email. "There was something so special about his connection to Allerton. It really helped me to have that as a core to build around."

Anderson's costumes aimed to evoke "a seismic moment when men's style really started to change," he says. And Starkey aimed for authenticity in pinpointing a particular midcentury moment in which the ideal male form was less creatine, more calisthenics. "I lost some weight for it," he says. "It changes how you move and breathe. It's nice -- my body felt different than it ever had. That helped a lot." Starkey shed 30 pounds by shifting his exercise routine from weightlifting to yoga, which -- frightened to show up at a studio and expose his naivete -- he did via YouTube while rehearsing in Rome.

"It informs your movement -- in a way, I felt more elusive. I could kind of slink back," he says. Eugene is slippery, flexible in a way that Starkey had never been as he evades Lee's attempts to know him more deeply. To get into character, Starkeywent through dozens of glasses to find the pair that brought out the character's earnest side. He almost looks like Clark Kent. When we compare Eugene to Superman's alter ego, Starkey laughs. "Yeah, this is Americana. Listen, Eugene is actually a Superman origin story. This is the Man of Steel himself."

But DC Comics might blush at the comparison. Eugene's all-American boy is also rapaciously physical and eager to please. In sex scenes that are both explicit and truly revealing, Eugene and Lee capture the tension and longing of a one-night stand that turns into something more. There was an intimacy coordinator on set, Starkey says, "but it was 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 nearly 20 years since "Brokeback Mountain" have seen straight actors grow more comfortable with the idea of playing queer characters. But even "Call Me by Your Name," in 2017, was a challenge to cast because of the trepidation many leading men had about playing gay love scenes in an indie art-house film. Guadagnino eventually made stars of Chalamet and Armie Hammer, rather than casting established names. ("Well, it worked out," Craig says of that film with a chuckle.)

"It wasn't part of the audition process -- he didn't ask us the intricacies of our sexuality," Starkey says.

"I'm not dismissing it, but I didn't really ..." Craig trails off. "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. 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."

Guadagnino hardly finds the subject novel. "I've been shooting sex on-screen since I did my short film 'Qui' when I was 22. I always said to myself, if you start to give that scene a level of awareness or alarm, it's going to become what it shouldn't be." For the director, any special emphasis on sex as something other than a fact of life pulls viewers out of the moment. "Quality means making an audience surrender to what they are seeing," he says, "not judging, not feeling the fakeness of it, but believing it completely."

Immersive and complete, "Queer" arrives at a place of totalizing emotion -- these characters' frantic scrabbling in bed gives us perspective on all the companionship and love they've been denied by an unkind and unfeeling society. Part of what helped Guadagnino shoot rapidly -- quickly enough, after all, to ensure Starkey was back in teen-soap land right on schedule -- was the actors' connections to their roles. "Daniel and Drew knew that we had to show the love," he says. "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!"

Starkey deflates the idea that the film's sex scenes will -- or should -- be controversial. "We can go on our phones and go on any website and see whatever you want. Daniel doesn't -- " Both men cackle. "But as a culture, we're so attuned to that." This film, though, "came from a loving place that's so much deeper than abrupt images."

"I've been in movies with terrible love scenes," Craig adds. "It doesn't work. You need a director who has a sensitivity, a director who understands -- to put it crassly -- how to make it real. That's one's job on the day: to make it as real as possible."

And do they ever. But audiences anticipating one sort of physical frankness may be stunned by the emotional bareness that occurs outside the bedroom. Deep in the film, the characters are meeting each other in a whole new way while under the influence of hallucinogens: "The discussion was, How do we put an ayahuasca trip on-screen without making it terrible?," Craig recalls. Guadagnino came up with the idea to have the characters perform a choreographed dance together; the actors spent their time off set during the shoot's first six weeks rehearsing.

"A big part of it was embarrassing ourselves in front of one another. We both realized we weren't dancers," Starkey says. "You can grow to know someone by really making a fool out of yourself in front of them. And we did that for weeks."

It will be a different kind of provocation -- and will, Starkey hopes, distract at least a few of audience members from the rest of the movie's content. The actor, raised as one of four children in western North Carolina, is close to his family, and he's anticipated what it will be like for his parents to finally see the movie. "I keep telling them, when we watch the film, the roles will be reversed," he says. "I grew up with them shielding my eyes during certain scenes. I was like, 'When we watch this one, I'll be shielding your eyes.'"