Omar Apollo goes full-frontal in ‘Queer’ & more early reactions to Luca Guadagnino’s explicit gay odyssey

The fall film festival season just got a little more… Queer, thanks to the arrival of the latest feature from Call Me By Your Name and Challengers filmmaker Luca Guadagnino.

Based on a novel of the same name from acclaimed writer William S. Burroughs, the drama finds Daniel Craig playing Lee, a lonely American drug addict living in Mexico City in the ’50s who becomes infatuated with a young student (Outer Banks‘ Drew Starkey).

We’ve been following the project pretty closely (especially after Guadagnino teased the film’s sex scenes would be “numerous and quite scandalous”), devouring every morsel of information we could find since it was announced in late 2022. And, now that Queer has finally debuted at the Venice Film Festival, we are being fed.

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Omar Apollo makes his full-frontal acting debut in Queer

Ahead of the film’s world premiere, co-stars Drew Starkey and Omar Apollo—the pop star whose role was widely speculated before being confirmed earlier this summer—linked up for a conversation in Interview magazine that certainly raised some eyebrows.

In the piece, the pair sing each one another’s praises and clearly became fast friends on set, bonding over things like being outsiders in the industry and—oh yeah—filming intimate scenes with Craig.

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That’s right: Apollo’s going to be getting in on that action, too! When rumors began to swirl that the singer-songwriter had been spotted on the set of Queer, it was unclear whether he would just be making a cameo or his proper acting debut. But now we have confirmation that he’s leaving it all on screen.

While asking Starkey about his preparation for the role, Apollo shares that he, too, went on a strict “soup diet”:

“Luca did not tell me to lose weight,” he reveals, “but when you’re about to have a sex scene with Daniel Craig, you’re like, ‘Oh, dude, I can’t be looking off.'”

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Sure, one can understand being nervous about sharing scenes with the man who can rock tiny blue swim trunks like no other, though Apollo maintains it was mostly about being loyal to Burroughs’ original words, making sure he matched his character’s description:

“I lost 20 pounds because I read in the script that my character had a flat brown stomach,” he tells Starkey. “I was like, ‘Damn, I’m actually not flat right now.’ I had to get it together, and I was on tour with SZA. Luckily, I didn’t have that many lines.”

Not only is there minimal dialogue for Apollo, but apparently minimal wardrobe, too. During the Venice press conference for Queer, New York Times reporter Kyle Buchanan snapped a pic of the star, adding he’s “nude for most of his screen time” in the film. Now this is journalism!

Singer Omar Apollo, who’s nude for most of his screen time in QUEER, is also at the press conference pic.twitter.com/jTLLuOmzwT— Kyle Buchanan (@kylebuchanan) September 3, 2024

Luca Guadagnino dismisses question about “gay James Bond”

At the same conference, Craig was of course asked about the film’s many, many intimate moments, offering up a perfectly professional response:

“You know as well as I do, there’s nothing intimate about filming a sex scene on a movie set. There’s a room full of people watching you,” Craig said, per Variety. “We just wanted to make it as touching and as real and as natural as we possibly could. Drew is a wonderful, fantastic, beautiful actor to work with and we kind of had a laugh. We tried to make it fun.”

Speaking of fun, Guadagnino’s response to another prying question from press is already garnering quite a bit of attention…

When asked if there could ever be a “gay James Bond”—referring to the actor’s famous former role—Craig seems a bit flustered and rolls his eyes, but his director steps in to shut down the silly speculation:

“Guys, let’s be adult[s] in the room for a second,” Guadagnino says to some laughter and light applause. “There is no way around the fact that nobody would ever know James Bond’s desires, period. The important thing is that he does his missions properly.”

We’re sure that won’t stop people from wondering about 007’s sexuality, but maybe they’ll stop asking Daniel Craig about it. Besides, the man’s busy playing another sleuth, Knives Out‘s Benoit Blanc, these days—and if early reactions to Queer are any indication, he’s got a brand new role for audiences to obsess over…

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Early reactions to “erotic & sorrowful” Queer are here

On Tuesday, September 3, the review embargo lifted on Guadagnino’s latest, and reactions have come rolling in, with top critics—like Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman—hailing it as a “bold and trippy odyssey.”

Vanity Fair‘s Richard Lawson warns that Queer may alienate certain audiences, but praises the drama as both “erotic and sorrowful,” exploring “ruinous” sexual and romantic obsession.

He adds that the dynamic between Craig and Starkey’s character “is exactingly realized in the film, familiar to anyone who has contradictorily sought both affection and rejection from a person whose whims and attractions are mercurial.” Oof, sounds painful (in a good way).

Meanwhile, Indiewire‘s Ryan Lattanzio calls attention to Guadagnino’s “feverishly charged, sensually filmed encounters,” which he claims are “the most explicit gay sex scenes I can remember in any mainstream movie.”

He also notes two instances where, during sex scenes, the director’s camera pans to a window, away from the action, “only to cut back to the lovers to find them going at it even harder than before.”

It would appear this is Guadagnino trolling the very same audiences who criticized him for avoiding intimate moments in his previous gay romance, Call Me By Your Name, which memorably panned to an open window during a scene where Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer’s characters start to get more hot & heavy. This man is getting pretty good at silencing the haters!

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Currently, Queer sits at a “Fresh” 80% approval rating on review aggregator site RottenTomatoes, and features a wide range of ratings on the film-centric social media platform Letterboxd, likely averaging around 3.5/5 stars.

Of course, it only just premiered, so more reaction and hot takes are sure to come, including at the the New York Film Festival, where the film will make its American premiere on October 6. Last week, famed indie studio A24 picked the film up for U.S. distribution, though no theatrical release date has been announced yet.

In the meantime, there are plenty more reactions to the film on X, so check out some highlights below:

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