Though Daniel Craig certainly doesn’t look back all too fondly on his time playing legendary spy James Bond, that doesn’t mean he doesn’t enjoy regaling others with tales of his experience. Speaking with Harris Dickinson for Variety’s “Actors on Actors” series, Craig’s “Queer” co-star Drew Starkey shared that in working with the British actor, he was often exposed to the nitty gritty of being 007 unprompted.
“He kind of just started talking about it. He was very willing to share,” said Starkey. “I got a lot of insider trading on that, which is cool.”
But Bond wasn’t the only piece of Craig’s career history that impressed Starkey. In having to play opposite him, often in very intimate scenes, Starkey wasn’t sure if he’d be able to see past the legend in front of him, but found very quickly that he was just like any other collaborator.
“I think he’s one of our great actors, truly, and you go in and you’re like, ‘God, I wonder what he’s like’ and it’s like any anyone in this business: You meet them, in the first five minutes all that sheds away and he’s Daniel,” Starkey said to Dickinson. “It’s amazing how open and inviting he is and he looks at you as an equal and he’s ready to share his own insecurities and fears about what we’re about to do, so you’re like, ‘Oh great he’s in it with me.’ And then kind of getting like a master class on set.”
One scene that really offered Starkey a chance to get close to Craig, both physically and emotionally, is when both are tripping on ayahuasca in the South American jungle and unite, in the buff, for messy dance in the mud. Starkey shared that they rehearsed for it for months, but shot the scene over the “course of a night.” As Craig recently revealed on “The Graham Norton Show,” this was likely due to the circumstances of how they had to stage the moment at Cinecittà Studios in Rome.
“I won’t give the game away, but there’s a dance in the movie and we were doing outside on the back lot and it was just ground it was gravel and we had to sort of roll around,” said Craig. “I was like we’re going to get cut to pieces. We’re naked, as in the scene, and someone very kindly said, ‘That’s not going to work.’ We’re going to be bleeding, it’s not going to be very good for the scene, so we got back the following night and someone had put like 50 lbs of coffee grounds on the ground to look like dirt, which is great, soft and lovely, but you can absorb it through your skin.”
As a result, both Craig and Starkey were struggling with caffeine jitters by the end of the night shoots. Likely this was not something either wanted to endure again, but a unique bonding experience nonetheless.
Watch Starkey and Dickinson’s full “Actors on Actors” and the clip of Craig on “The Graham Norton Show” below.
“Queer” is currently in theaters from A24.
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