Drew Starkey

Watch Drew Starkey take a drink he has been bought. He accepts it, he drinks it, and somewhere in the middle of doing so his eyes go to the door. That is Eugene Allerton in Queer (2024), and it is the only thing Luca Guadagnino's Burroughs adaptation asks of him for ninety minutes: to be wanted by Daniel Craig's Lee and to leave open the question of whether he wants anything back. Starkey never answers it. It is a harder job than Craig's, because Craig gets to make a fool of himself and Starkey only gets to watch him do it.

He came to the part by an odd route. From 2014 he was doing small jobs, Garrett in Love, Simon (2018), Tommy Matson in The Devil All the Time (2020), and then five seasons and 49 episodes as Rafe Cameron, the volatile older brother in Outer Banks (2020–2026). We have not reviewed the series, so we will only note that Rafe is loud where Allerton is quiet, and that the same man was cast as both. Guadagnino asked him, in Starkey's own account, 'Can you play hard to read?' Some have found the jump from a teen series to a lead opposite Craig a steep one. We think the casting was the point: a face an audience already knows as dangerous, told to sit still.

The stillness works because it is specific. Starkey does not play mystery in the usual way, all half-smiles and looks held a beat too long; he plays a young man who has learnt that agreeing to everything commits him to nothing. Guadagnino gives him Craig to react to, and Craig, doing the best work of his career, hands him scene after scene. We spent more of Queer watching Starkey than Craig, which we had not expected, and we came out slightly uneasy at how little we had learnt about Allerton after all that time in his company. That unease is the performance doing exactly what it was for.

The limit is that we have seen him do one thing well in a cinema. In Onslaught (2026), Adam Wingard's small siege film, he plays Cyrus, and he did not stay with us; Adria Arjona holds the door and the film, and Starkey is one of the people behind her. That may be the part rather than the actor. But a face that gives nothing back is a young man's trick, and it stops being interesting once the face is older. Lucky (2026) and King Snake are on the way. We would like the next one to make him want something out loud, and to see whether he can.