To many he’s known as the Rafe Cameron, the teen villain with an impressive redemption arc in Netflix’s pandemic hit Outer Banks.
But Drew Starkey is leaving his teen heartthrob self behind (although we’re sure his OG fans will stick around), now set to become a bona fide movie star – and it’s all thanks to one Hollywood’s most recognisable faces.
It was none other than James Bond himself, Daniel Craig, who helped to secure Starkey’s position a rising star.
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Starkey and Craig star together in Luca Guadagnino’s tragic romance, Queer.
Starkey plays Eugene Allerton, a discharged American navyman who becomes the younger object of Craig’s character Lee’s obsession.
When an audition tape of Starkey’s – made for an unrelated project – came across Guadagnino’s desk, the director had a gut instinct he was the right person for the role, and his suspicions were confirmed when he ran the idea by Craig.
After watching the tape, the Knives Out star shared three simple words with his director that not only secured Starkey’s role in the film, but also his trajectory to stardom.
“That’s the guy,” Craig told Guadagnino.
So, Starkey’s name was added to the call sheet of a director known to skyrocket up-and-coming actors to new heights of fame (Guadagino was also the man behind Timothee Chalamet’s breakout role in Call Me By Your Name, as well as box office hit Challengers, which saw Zendaya’s name pop up in awards season chatter for the first time).
While he may be a new face to some, many will have that eerie feeling when watching the film, certain they’ve seen Starkey somewhere before but just not able to put their finger on it.
Drew Starkey’s life growing up – and the teen heartthrob he always related to
Growing up in Hickory, North Carolina, it seemed Starkey’s life was already laid out for him.
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His mum was a school counsellor and his dad a career college basketball coach, who now leads the women’s team at Kent State College.
“I got a little bit of Troy Bolton in me,” Starkey told People, likening the life-defining decision he had to make at a young age – basketball or theatre? – to the one faced by Zac Efron’s character in High School Musical.
The Outer Banks star started theatre around nine or 10 years old, telling Pop Culturalist his family was “very musical”.
“[My] grandpa was an opera singer. He was on Broadway in the late fifties. My uncle started an opera house in Asheville, North Carolina,” he said.
He began community theatre as a kid, then when he got to high school it was his theatre teacher, Molly Rice, who helped persuade him to pursue it as a career.
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Starkey told W Magazine that deep down he’d always known his true passion was in theatre, but “it felt like a secret”.
“I loved being onstage,” he shared.
“When I was 19, a teacher told me that I should do this with my life. And I was like, oh…”
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So, then came the day Troy Bolton himself dreaded: sharing that he really was a theatre kid, not the jock people had believed him to be.
”Basketball was my first love,” Starkey told People, adding that despite it all, he couldn’t resist the pull to theatre.
“I was like, ‘No, Dad, I want to sing and dance, you know, I’m meant to be an actor’,” he shared.
“Sometimes you can hit a flow where it feels like, ‘This is what I’m meant to be doing’, and it’s second nature.”
So, after high school Starkey enrolled in Western Carolina University where he studied English and theatre, joking to Esquire that it was “good to have an English degree as a fallback”.
After graduation he packed up and left North Carolina, moving down to Atlanta, where two friends of his had started a production company.
From there, he tells GQ he started “auditioning like a f—ing madman”.
From teen heartthrob to bonafide movie star
“The first job I booked was on a Fox television show,” Starkey told W Magazine.
“I played a punk-ass kid who gets pulled over by the cops. It was the first time I was on set, and I was like, ‘Oh my god’!
“That day, I wished there was a tour guide. No one explains it to you. I think I was too nervous to eat.”
The star kicked his career off by “just saying yes to everything”, telling GQ he “felt like a one-man travelling show” driving all across the south for small roles on TV, short films, student films, anything he could get his name attached too.
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While waiting for his big break, Starkey waited tables to help pay the bills, working tirelessly in hopes of one day ‘making it’.
He managed to score small roles in big projects some are able to pinpoint his face from, including shows like Ozark and films Love, Simon and The Hate U Give.
Eventually he packed up and left Atlanta for the bright lights of Hollywood. But it wasn’t long after he moved to LA that he got a phone call asking him to move back down south.
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“They called and said, ‘Can you move out to Charleston and shoot for the next five, six months?'” he remembered of the day he was offered the role of Rafe Cameron on Outer Banks.
“I was like holy s—, yes. I’d always contributed to a little sliver of stories, right? Never been part of the big picture.
“And so that was really exciting. It’s all I wanted. I was like, I want to be there from the beginning to end and be part of the process.”
So, in the middle of 2019, Starkey packed up and made his way to South Carolina, where he spent the next five years starring on one of the biggest teen dramas of the past decade.
“I think it’s some way of life, telling me that the South is still my home and I’m kind of meant to be there,” he told W Magazine.
Years after this big break, after Guadagnino showed Starkey’s unrelated audition tape to Craig to confirm his suspicions this was indeed the right man for the role of Eugene Allerton, the director reached out to the young star to invite him to breakfast.
“I was like, ‘what the f—?'” Starkey told GQ, explaining his confusion stemmed from the fact that not only had he not sent Guadagnino an audition tape, but there was “no way” the Oscar-nominated director had seen Outer Banks.
“We talked about our lives, we talked about the weather, and we talked about Los Angeles,” Starkey told The Hollywood Reporter of their first meeting.
“And he brought up this project that he’s been working on and asked if I could put a few scenes on tape.”
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He went home and ordered a copy of William S. Burrough’s novel Queer – the source material for Guadagnino’s film – and read it in a day.
Then, a few months later, he got the call. Eugene Allerton was his.
He didn’t meet Craig until the table read in New York, where Starkey said he very quickly realised they were going to work well together.
“I liked Drew from the moment I met him,” Craig told GQ.
“He’s such a wonderful, kind human being, and that was very obvious to me from the very start.”
But there were two things Craig and Guadagnino had in common: One, they had never seen, or really had any knowledge of, Outer Banks, and two, they had no idea of the die-hard fanbase Starkey had grown from his time on the show.
Guadagnino told GQ that, humble as ever, Starkey hadn’t told him or Craig anything of his involvement in the Netflix hit.
“I discovered that Drew made [Outer Banks] and was a celebrity the day in which, leaving the studios after a day of work, I saw a thick crowd of fans holding banners with his name in front of the gates, screaming, ‘Drew, Drew, Drew!'”
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