“Queer” stars Daniel Craig, Drew Starkey on finding meaning in sex scenes: 'It's just a representation of reality'

"I feel like the physical act is the least interesting thing," Craig says in conversation with director Luca Guadagnino.

Queer has been described as the year's most provocative drama. The Turkish government in Istanbul even banned it from screening at a film festival, using the same descriptor: "...provocative content that would endanger public peace." The stars and director, however, don't feel the material, based on the famously unfinished novella by William S. Burroughs, is as provocative as you might read about in the press.

"I feel like the physical act is the least interesting thing," Daniel Craig, who plays William Lee, a projection of Burroughs himself, tells Entertainment Weekly over Zoom earlier in November. "We're all grownups. This is what people do. But the only thing that's interesting, and what I think hopefully works about the scenes, is the emotional journey of each character. That's what we wanted to get across. I think that's why they work."

Queer hones in on 1950s Mexico City, where Lee, along with similarly minded ex-pats, is free to enjoy same-sex relationships, in addition to healthy affairs with heroin, alcohol, and other substances. He becomes fixated on Eugene Allerton (Outer Banks' Drew Starkey), a younger man exploring his bisexuality, seemingly for the first time. The film, directed by Call Me By Your Name's Luca Guadagnino and written by his Challengers scribe Justin Kuritzkes, features multiple intimate flesh-on-flesh contact between the men as Lee takes them into Latin America in search of a drug called yage, more commonly known as ayahuasca.

Related: Luca Guadagnino thinks Turkey’s Queer ban helps the movie 'become more cult' (exclusive)

Starkey casually embodies the chic sex appeal of Eugene, even fully clothed, but the actor does not claim credit for that. He remembers a moment after Queer's Venice Film Festival premiere where Celine Strong, Kuritzkes' wife and the director of Oscar-nominated Past Lives, approached him. "She was like, 'You've never looked that way in a film before, have you?'" Starkey recalls in a separate interview with EW. "I was like, 'No! I don't know what it is.'" The answer Strong gave him was Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, the cinematographer. "Sayombhu lights for people, not for scenes," she told Starkey.

In terms of the sex scenes themselves, "I think people love asking about that stuff," Starkey comments, "but it's certainly not provocative for the sake of being provocative in any way. Luca wanted everything to be imbued with meaning and leading with love. And it's truthful. It's just two people who are in this type of strange, loving relationship and they're working through that. It's just a representation of reality. It's two people; this is the way it works."

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Most of what they wanted to achieve with the intimate sequences, including Lee's desire to be so close to Eugene that they forge a telepathic connection, was already written in Kuritzkes' script, Starkey notes. "Me and Luca and Daniel had extensive conversations about it and how we wanted it to feel, and the music of it and the dance," the actor continues. "So by the time we got to shooting it, it felt like we'd already planned it out to a point. There's only so much you can plan. Then you just shoot it, and you see what happens."

Related: Daniel Craig, Outer Banks star heat up the first Queer trailer

"We both agreed by agreeing on making the movie together that we were to go in a very profound space with this movie, emotional space," Guadagnino says of his conversations with Craig. "So whether it's injecting heroin, drinking, and being a raconteur, or finally having the body clash with the body of the other, it was all about committing deeply to what this character had to go through and be. That's it, I think. Of course, it might sound very easy. It's not easy because there is one factor that 90 percent of the time is not there, which is the sensitivity, the intelligence, and the playfulness of the performers who want to perform something that for the average [performer] seems to be excessive. If you do it from the perspective of behavior, then everything becomes very natural and very profound, even though we're playing."

Guadagnino first read Burroughs' Queer around the age of 17, a particularly "precautious" time in his life, the filmmaker points out. He describes the experience as "an act of defiance to myself," in that he was searching for more complicated literature, even if he were to have a difficult time grasping the material. Years later, with the film adaptation, Guadagnino hoped he came with a "compassionate understanding that the core of the book is about the fragility of Burroughs' emotional life."

Craig didn't have such a reading experience but did pore over Kuritzkes' screenplay, as well as the novella, and felt his instincts aligned with what Guadagnino wanted to achieve. "I saw this very complicated, emotional character in the book that I thought would be just a joy to take on and really have a go at trying to create," the actor says.

Related: Challengers director Luca Guadagnino reveals peach moment is not Call Me by Your Name reference

In terms of that "provocative" descriptor, as well as Turkey's ban of the film, Guadagnino has some thoughts. "Nobody would argue that we have a lot of people jumping from roofs and motorbikes at high speed if we're doing a big action movie," the director says. "But if you're doing a big emotional movie about contact, we should reclaim the necessity of representing that the way we have to in every way."

Queer will play in select theaters Nov. 27.