In their feverish film, Craig plays a man embroiled in a drug-fuelled gay affair. He and director Guadagnino talk about love, ageing – and a forgotten sex act

There is no shortage of directors who have made movies about gay life only to then backtrack and claim they were not specifically gay stories after all: Tom Ford did it with A Single Man, William Friedkin with both Cruising and The Boys in the Band. Luca Guadagnino, the director of Call Me By Your Name and this year’s steamy tennis romcom Challengers, is not about to play that game. “It is the most gigantic gay film in history,” he says of his latest picture, for which he recreated 1950s Mexico City on 12 stages at the Cinecittà studios in Rome. “I don’t think there has ever been a bigger gay movie.” Then again, he doesn’t have much wriggle room: the film is called Queer.

His feverish adaptation of William S Burroughs’s novel, which was written in the early 1950s but not published until 1985, concerns an American expat, William Lee, who locks eyes with a young stranger across a crowded cockfight. This is Eugene Allerton, a clean-cut, blade-like presence, played by Drew Starkey. And who should star as Lee, the gauche, fumbling, sweaty goofball, but Daniel Craig? If No Time to Die hadn’t killed off James Bond, Queer would have done it in a trice.