Daniel Craig premieres Luca Guadagnino film Queer at Venice to 11-minute standing ovation

Daniel Craig is the latest A-lister to grace the Sala Grande at the Venice Film Festival for the premiere of his new project, Queer.

Craig was suave in an off-white suit as he, his co-stars including Lesley Manville and Drew Starkey, and director Luca Guadagnino descended the stairs at the end of the screening. The actors and filmmaker was greeted with an 11-minute standing ovation.

Craig had attended the premiere with his wife, Oscar-winning actor Rachel Weisz. The two were also guests at an exclusive pre-premiere celebration at Hotel Cipriani, hosted by Loewe creative director Jonathan Anderson, who also served as the costume designer on the film.

Set in the 1950s in an expat community in Mexico City, Craig plays an American named William Lee (Craig) who spends most of his days alone until a student named Eugene Allerton (Starkey) arrives in town.

Lee then pursues Allerton, trying to form a connection and understand his pent-up desires.

Queer is adapted from a 1985 novel by William S. Burroughs who wrote the story in the 1950s but didn’t publish it for several decades.

At a press conference, Craig said he and Starkey spent months rehearsing the sex scenes, approaching it as choreography.

But, he added, “There’s nothing intimate about filming a sex scene on a movie set, there’s a roomful of people watching you. We just wanted to make it as touching and real and as natural as we possibly could, and (Starkey) is a wonderful, fantastic, beautiful actor to work with, and we just kind of had a laugh. We tried to make it fun.”

Guadagnino said Craig was a generous collaborator and one of the few “iconic actors who allow their fragility to be seen”.

But there does appear to be a small handful of detractors who objected to Queer’s explicit scenes. At a press screening earlier in the day, The New York Times’ Kyle Buchanan posted on social media that the man who was sat next to him “audibly groaned or muttered ‘oh god’ during every gay sex scene”.

Buchanan also said there were loud boos after the press screening while Variety reported “dozens of viewers” walked out, but that the premiere audience had stayed put.

There had also been a question at the press conference from a reporter who asked if there would ever be a gay James Bond. Craig visibly rolled his eyes while Guadagnino replied, “Guys, let’s be adults in the room for a second. There is no way (anybody) would ever know James Bond’s desires.”

Guadagnino directed the film from a script by Justin Kuritzkes, who reunited with the Italian filmmaker after they both worked on Challengers, which starred Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist in a love triangle story that was, arguably, queer-coded.

Guadagnino had also made the queer romance Call Me By Your Name while his other works include A Bigger Splash, Bones and All, I Am Love and Suspiria, a remake of Dario Argento’s body horror film.

Since hanging up his pistols as Bond, Craig has made three Knives Out murder mysteries.

He said of his latest release: “Queer is this emotional thump in a tiny book, and it is about love, but it’s about loss, it’s about loneliness, it’s about yearning, it’s about all of these things.

“And I mean, my god, if I was writing myself a part, and trying to tick off things that I wanted to do, this would fulfil all of them.”