Good news: Omar Apollo and Daniel Craig make love in Queer

The last few years have seen a simmering cold war between people who believe that popular culture has never been more sexless, and those who think that “makers” are burdening their films and TV shows with unnecessary smut. In a devastating blow for the latter camp, Omar Apollo has just revealed – in Interview Magazine – that he shares a sex scene with Daniel Craig in Luca Guadagnino’s Queer.

Speaking with fellow Queer star Drew Starkey, Apollo described losing weight before shooting the scene. “I had to get on the soup diet. Luca did not tell me to lose weight, but when you’re about to have a sex scene with Daniel Craig, you’re like, ‘Oh, dude, I can’t be looking off,’” he said. He also spoke highly of the experience of working with Craig, describing the actor as “such a legend” and “super vulnerable”. 

Queer – which will premiere at the Venice Film Festival this week – is an adaptation of a 1985 William Burroughs novel of the same title. Set in 1940s Mexico City, it’s about an outcast American expat (played by Craig) who becomes infatuated with a troubled younger man (played by Starkey.) The film shares a screenwriter with Challengers, and marks the first acting role for Apollo, who first rose to musical stardom in 2018.

Burroughs’ writing is notoriously explicit and extreme, which makes for an unlikely pairing with Gaudagnino’s more restrained sensibility – he’s certainly a sensual filmmaker, and arguably an erotic one, but he’s never really been one for full-throated sex scenes. In Challengers it is mostly implied (there’s a lot of kissing, but the much-hyped ‘threesome’ never actually happens) and some critics found Call Me By Your Name much too chaste and “sanitised” in its depiction of gay sex, cutting away to a shot of a natural landscape right at the point when Oliver and Elio get undressed.

Anyone looking forward to hardcore action between Craig and Apollo might be disappointed – based on Guadagnino’s past filmography, it’s sure to be tastefully done – but sex scenes don’t have to be explicit to be impactful. “Unnecessary” or not, the depiction of sexuality should be welcomed at a time when mainstream cinema is so prudish and relentlessly family-friendly. Let’s just try to make it through the coming year without doing any age-gap discourse about the pairing of a 27 and 56-year-old man.