Luca Guadagnino may have served a career-best with this year’s Zendaya-starring, tennis love-triangle drama, Challengers—but his next film could have the power to surpass it. As film festival season kicks off, his next project, Queer, is set to be one of the buzziest films premiering this fall. The film stars Daniel Craig in his first post-007 dramatic film role, which is also being hailed as an Oscar-worthy, career-high performance. Here’s everything to know about Queer:
What is the plot of Queer?
Queer is based on William S. Burroughs’s semi-autobiographical novel of the same name, which was a follow-up of sorts to his seminal 1953 novel, Junkie. Written in the early 1950s, Queer wasn’t published until 1985, when it quickly became a classic of both the Beat and gay literature genres. Craig stars as Burroughs’s alter ego, Lee, a World War II veteran living in late-1940s Mexico City, surviving on part-time jobs and his GI Bill benefits. Lee finds himself part of a bar scene filled with gay American expats and college students, and falls for younger man Allerton, who is based on Burroughs’s real-life love interest, fellow veteran Adelbert Lewis Marker.
Who is in the Queer cast?
In addition to Craig, Drew Starkey (Outer Banks) plays the young Allerton. Jason Schwartzman, Lesley Manville, and Henrique Zaga are also in the cast.
Aside from his role as mischievous detective Benoit Blanc in the Knives Out universe, this marks Craig’s first role since portraying James Bond in five films since 2006. While the 56-year-old British actor has never received an Oscar nod over his three-decade career, this role could clinch him the win.
Speaking to the Hollywood Reporter, Venice Film Festival Director Barbera said there were “a couple of performances I think people will find absolutely outstanding” on the Venice lineup, including Joaquin Phoenix’s in Joker: Folie à Deux and Craig in Queer. “I think they are the performances of their lifetimes,” he said. “I would be surprised if we don’t see them at the Academy Awards next year.”
Who else worked on Queer?
Guadagnino tapped many of his frequent collaborators for Queer. In his W cover story earlier this year, the director told Loewe’s Jonathan Anderson that Queer is “the movie of my life. I’ve wanted to make it since I was 20. In the process, I wrote a script that I discarded, but the brilliant writer of Challengers, Justin Kuritzkes, has written the adaptation of Queer. It’s a real labor of love.”
Challengers cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom and music composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross are also involved in the project.
When is the Queer release date?
Queer will have its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival on September 3, and its U.S. premiere at the New York Film Festival the following month on October 6. Stay tuned for a wide release date.
Queer is the third Guadagnino film to play at NYFF, following 2017’s Call Me by Your Name and 2022’s Bones and All. The Challengers director is also currently working on Separate Rooms, a story about an Italian writer mourning the loss of his boyfriend.
What is Queer’s runtime?
Barbera said in another interview that, sadly, a shortened version of Queer will be playing at the premiere. “I’ve seen two versions of the film, the one that will screen is the third, and shortest, it lasts 135 minutes. The first version was 200 minutes, the second was 150 minutes,” he said. “It’s a sorry situation, I feel sorry that you won’t get to see the original cut, because I know exactly what Luca cut out: all of [Daniel] Craig’s wanderings in the gay clubs of Mexico City, with this incredible fauna of gay life, in search of adventure.”
He added, “I hope that sooner or later, Guadagnino will make the director’s cut, because there are beautiful things that you won’t get to see. I feel bad that Queer has been trimmed out because it was far from inessential to the story and the construction of the character.”
