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Singer Omar Apollo has revealed he has a sex scene with former James Bond star Daniel Craig in Luca Guadagnino’s upcoming film Queer.
Queer, which is based on the 1985 novel by cult author William S Burroughs, premieres this week at the Venice International Film Festival.
Craig stars as the Burroughs surrogate character William Lee, while Outer Banks star Drew Starkey plays Eugene Allerton.
In a conversation with Starkey for Interview magazine, Apollo revealed that he lost weight before filming the intimate scene with Craig.
“I had to get on the soup diet,” said Apollo. “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.’ I was at 200 pounds, because I’m six-five.”
He continued: “It’s around where I should be, honestly. But I got down to 181 when the movie came. I lost 20 pounds because I read in the script that my character had a flat brown stomach. 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.”
Starkey, who had recently seen the film, tells Apollo that the scene is “so good” and “very sensual.”
Guadagnino is known for his 2017 romance Call Me by Your Name, starring Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer, and 2024’s Challengers, starring Zendaya, Josh O'Connor, and Mike Faist.
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“I read too much Freud to be taking seriously these kind of critics,” he said. “Meaning that I honestly don’t believe I have the right to decide whether an actor is straight or not. Who am I to know what somebody is thinking of himself or herself within themselves. Yes, Armie is a straight man with a wife and children and the same can be said of Timothée. But do I ask them to swear on their sexuality, on their identities, on their desires, before I cast them? I don’t!
“That sounds to be dull and a little preposterous. If I have to cast what people think is the real thing for a role, I wouldn’t be able to cast. I cannot cast a gay man to play Oliver. I have to cast Oliver to play Oliver because the identities of gay men are as multiple as the flowers in the realm of earth. So, there is not a gay identity. One person who is gay is completely different to another person who is gay.”
