Drew Starkey: Outer Banks gave him the audience, Queer gave him the role

Drew Starkey

Photo: Itsyaara / CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	November 4, 1993 Asheville, North Carolina, USA
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Love, Simon, The Hate U Give, Just Mercy

Luca Guadagnino never asked Drew Starkey to audition. A producer friend showed him a self-tape — one reel, no callbacks — and that was enough. The director of Call Me by Your Name and Challengers saw something in the North Carolina actor who had spent five years making a character audiences loved to despise, and offered him the lead opposite Daniel Craig in an adaptation of William S. Burroughs. The offer was either proof of remarkable instinct or remarkable trust, possibly both.

Starkey grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains — Asheville first, then Hickory, North Carolina, where his father Todd coached college basketball. He learned guitar and piano, played baseball, and discovered theater at St. Stephens High School, not a place with a track record of launching actors but a place where a drama class arrived at the right moment. He went to Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, double-majored in English and Theater Performance, and graduated in 2016 with a scholarship named for a founder of the campus drama program. He moved to Atlanta with two friends, formed a small production company, and started auditioning.

The early roles were minor. Love, Simon, the 2018 Greg Berlanti film about a teenager navigating a coming-out via anonymous email, gave him screen time in front of a large mainstream audience without really foregrounding him. He appeared in The Hate U Give the same year. What those years built was the discipline of inhabiting small corners of larger narratives — a kind of invisible training ground for what would come.

Outer Banks arrived in 2020. Netflix‘s sun-drenched thriller about rival teenage factions on the North Carolina coast could have cast Rafe Cameron as a simple obstacle — the wealthy antagonist who exists to be defeated at the end of each season. Starkey made different choices. Over five seasons and nearly fifty episodes, Rafe accumulated a psychology rather than a function: desperate for a father’s approval, capable of genuine violence, never quite sure where his own cruelty comes from. The show’s audience grew alongside an uncomfortable fascination with him. Fan communities catalogued his worst moments not to dismiss them but to argue about their causes. That paradox — the villain audiences commit to and return for — is difficult to build in a streaming era where attention is scarce and characterization often gives way to plot.

The critical reading of Rafe Cameron’s popularity is not entirely flattering to anyone involved. Outer Banks was built for accessible entertainment, and Starkey’s performance, however carefully shaded, existed within those constraints. Rafe was compelling within the genre; what that meant for the actor’s range outside it was an open question for most of the show’s run. The risk of an audience that loves to hate a character is that the love stops at the character and never reaches the performer.

Queer is the answer to that question, or the beginning of one. Guadagnino’s adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ semi-autobiographical novella premiered at the Venice International Film Festival in September 2024, with Daniel Craig playing William Lee — an aging American expat adrift in Mexico City, consuming and fixating — and Starkey opposite him as Eugene Allerton, a recently discharged Navy serviceman whose appeal to Lee lies precisely in his ambiguity. Allerton is not a simple object of desire; he is opaque, withholding, present in a way that is also absence. Starkey built the character through restraint rather than revelation, choosing not to explain Allerton but to let his stillness accumulate meaning. It was not a performance that announced itself. It worked because it did not.

Since Venice, the offers have arrived in a pattern that suggests deliberate repositioning. Jeff Nichols — the writer-director behind Take Shelter and Mud — cast Starkey opposite Margaret Qualley and Michael Shannon in King Snake, a Southern Gothic supernatural horror acquired by Neon; principal photography began in Arkansas in the spring of 2026. Sean Durkin, who made Martha Marcy May Marlene and The Nest, announced Deep Cuts with Cailee Spaeny at A24 in December 2025 — a love story set in the early 2000s about two music-obsessed twenty-somethings. In August 2026, Jonathan Anderson named him a Dior men’s brand ambassador. By the same month, Guadagnino’s name surfaced alongside a new adaptation of American Psycho; Starkey confirmed only that the script was extraordinary.

He is thirty-two, still shaped by the North Carolina hills where his father coached, still largely private about the distance between the person and the roles. King Snake and Deep Cuts together should clarify whether the Guadagnino casting was the event that repositioned him in the industry or simply the first move in a longer project — two films by two of the most distinct directorial voices in American independent cinema, in genres that require different things from an actor at the center. The audience built watching Rafe Cameron fail will either follow or not. The career being built seems unconcerned with the answer.

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Tags: actors, American cinema, Daniel Craig, Luca Guadagnino, Drew Starkey, Outer Banks, Queer

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