Daniel Craig On Playing ‘Queer’, Killing Bond And Being Nominated For A Golden Globe: “I Consider This Job To Be A Massive Privilege”

deadline.com:

Daniel Craig celebrated his third Golden Globes nomination last night by going to work, taking the stage at London’s Southbank for an extended Q&A with critic Mark Kermode.

The occasion was to publicize the release of Luca Guadagnino’s extraordinary film Queer, an adaptation of Beat writer William S.

Burroughs’ early memoir set in the gay subculture of 1950s Mexico City. Craig plays William Lee, a pseudonym Burroughs used to protect his parents from the then-scandalous aspects of his writing (homosexuality and hard drugs), but Guadagnino’s adaptation infuses the writer’s lean, skeletal prose with a romantic yearning that always existed in Burroughs’ heart if not on his pages. “The original story is not told with that much lyricism,” said Craig. “That’s down to Luca.

We decided very early on to get under this character’s skin and find out what he was about — the yearning, the love, and all of the things that Burroughs wasn’t really writing about.” He mentioned the fact that Guadagnino was even offended to hear Queer described as a film about unrequited love. “No, no, no, no,” the director had said. “Unrequited love is just stalking.