Omar Apollo on His Acting Debut in ‘Queer,’ Keeping Quiet About the Role, and Baring All with Daniel Craig
Vincent Perella
Luca Guadagnino’s “Queer” stars Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey in a heartbreaking installment in the “Challengers” director’s filmography. With Oscar nomination talks happening for Craig and a career-making turn from Starkey, another star enters the frame, and in his acting debut: Omar Apollo.
The Grammy-nominated pop star appears briefly alongside Craig’s character, Lee, in one of the film‘s buzziest scenes, showcasing the lengths Lee will go to for desire and Apollo in a role that’s hopefully not his last — and that portends bigger ones to come. In the scene, after exchanging longing looks, a drunken Lee picks up Apollo’s character at a bar and takes him back to a seedy love motel, where they have empty sex that leaves the alcoholic Lee once again bereft.
Though Apollo has taken some acting classes, he wasn’t really “putting energy towards it,” as he told IndieWire. But an Instagram DM from Guadagnino’s team changed the game.
“Somebody DM’d me on their end of things,” Apollo said. “They said, ‘Luca wants you in the film,’ and I was like, ‘OK, tell him I’ll be in it.’ I didn’t even know what it was. I hadn’t met him before, and then a few days later, we’re on a Facetime call with my manager, and then, he tells me about the role, about the scene, and what I would have to do.”
Apollo said he received Justin Kuritzkes’ screenplay, adapted from the 1985 novella by William S. Burroughs, from Guadagnino, who said, “If you’re interested, I think you’d be perfect.” The director caught up with Apollo over the phone while he was on tour before they met up in L.A. while Guadagnino was mixing “Challengers,” and then again in Rome.
Apollo’s casting news was under quite a tight seal until the Venice Film Festival lineup revealed his name among the cast. “I only told a few friends because I honestly didn’t want opinions about, ‘Oh, your first role is a sex scene? I don’t know, bro.'” [Laughs.]
He added, “I didn’t want that. So I kept it really tight. I told, like, five of my friends; I have tons of friends but, my five, you know, the mains. Then I was just cool with that. I mean, it’s all unfamiliar. It was all new. I was like, ‘Oh, like, how confidential is all this stuff?’ I just really [was thinking] that I didn’t want to lose the role. They don’t really talk to you that much when you’re in the process of getting a role, it’s a lot of waiting on an email or something. It ended up all being fine, and I guess I gossiped the perfect amount.”
Apollo also counts Taylor Russell, who starred in Guadagnino’s “Bones and All” alongside Timothée Chalamet, as a friend. “She loved [Luca Guadagnino]. I met them kind of together one time, and they had really good chemistry. He adores her, and she adores him.”
Apollo admitted, “I didn’t know how to gossip as an actor. I was so afraid of, like, if I said anything, I would lose the role, because they told me not to say anything. But then I think [costume designer] Jonathan [Anderson] was there, he’s like, ‘Omar’s going to be in ‘Queer’ with Luca and Daniel Craig.’ And then [Russell] was like, ‘What? No way!’ and then that’s how our friendship started. I love Taylor. She’s so talented and beautiful and everything in between.”
Starring alongside Craig, Apollo said the actors “didn’t really speak” until they shot their two scenes together. “I saw him one time when I was getting the prosthetic teeth. I was sitting down in the chair, and I looked over and saw him walk, and I was like, ‘Whoa, Daniel Craig, kind of crazy.’
“Then later Luca was like, ‘Come on set, come see us film this part of Daniel throwing something on the table,’ I think it was a watch. After that, I think the day that we were going to shoot, in the morning, we had a brief conversation of what we were doing. But still, we hadn’t really spoken yet. I think it was, first, when we were in the bar, and then when we do the scene in the hotel room, that was a different day. We spoke that morning, and we talked about each other’s lives, and he was telling me about some friends he had … we had some mutuals. I asked him some advice, and he gave me some really good advice, and he’s just really cool.”
Despite his short appearance in the film, Apollo had to undergo a bit of a physical transformation. “My birthday was like two days before. I went to a rave in Rome. I was really tired, but I felt prepared for the role. I lost like 20 pounds, because I wanted the character in the story to align with the real version of it. It said in the script that he had a flat brown stomach, and I was on the road on tour, and I was like, ‘Oh man, I need to hit the gym.’ I got a trainer, and I got on this diet, and I lost a bunch of weight to get ready for this role. I didn’t have any nervousness, because I felt confident.”
In a September conversation in Interview Magazine, Apollo opened up to Starkey about going all in with a soup diet to help lose weight. With Apollo being 6’5″, you “kind of plateau at some point,” even if you’re working out consistently.
“I’m not supposed to be very thin. I was like, ‘Just to go the extra mile, let me just get on the soup diet, and it works.’ I obviously didn’t maintain it, it was just for the role. It was just like soups and a flaxseed bar in the morning and then a lemon tonic. There was barely any food, so I tried not to do too much, but I think I was on it for a month. I was trying to chill. I wasn’t moving much … Being digitally immortalized, especially with Daniel Craig, I had to really focus.”
Within his first few minutes onscreen, Apollo goes full-frontal. “I didn’t show any signs of being uncomfortable when Luca asked about it. It was just like, ‘You know, Omar, it’s full-frontal. This is the role you’re doing, this is what you do.’ I just instantly said yes. After it, I had to process it and then while I was processing it, I think I spoke to like two of my friends.”
One of those friends was his co-star, Drew Starkey. “He was also in the same state of mind. There’s a lot of nudity. He was like, ‘Honestly, I’m so happy I’m talking to you because you already said yes.’ I was just like, ‘I think it’s fine, it’s with Luca, and this is an amazing script [based on a book by] William S. Burroughs. The way that he shoots love scenes and sex scenes is one of my favorite things about him, because it’s so human, he makes everything feel so human. I trusted him. I was like, ‘Yeah, if anyone’s going to do it, it’s him.’ Daniel told me he was in the sauna for like two hours the night before our scene.”
Apollo also attended the Venice Film Festival for the first time this year to celebrate the film’s global debut. When watching his moment with an audience for the first time, he said that “it was a good feeling.”
“I was taking it in. I was looking around at everyone’s faces. I was humble about that. I’m an artist, I’m from Indiana, and I’m not going to fake being humble. I was like, ‘Yes, watch this. This is a great thing. You should be paying attention, it’s important to William’s life.’ I lent myself to develop his character.”
As for where Apollo sees his onscreen career going next, he’s open to pursuing anything. “Denzel Washington is my favorite actor. I’ll be an extra [for him], just put me in the same room. I don’t even need to talk to him. Just let me be on the screen so I can show my nieces and nephews and be on the screen next to Denzel.”
“Omar is divine,” Guadagnino previously told IndieWire of casting Apollo. “You know, this character … in the book, that is the first person that Lee actually meets in the movie. [It] was so important to be very precise and, at the same time, very iconic. I always [have] been a fan of Omar. I thought that he could bring this feeling of contemporaneity to a movie that is set in a period that is far from us, because I think a great period drama behaves in relation with the present of the making of the movie. So I think Omar brings that.”
“Queer” premieres November 27 in theaters. Check out the trailer here.
