Foreign is described as the most provocative drama of the year. The Turkish government in Istanbul even banned the film from showing at a film festival, using the same description: “…provocative content that would endanger public peace.” However, the stars and director do not find the material, based on the famous unfinished novella by William S. Burroughs, as provocative as you might read in the press.

“I feel like the physical action is the least interesting thing,” says Daniel Craig, who plays William Lee, a projection of Burroughs himself. Entertainment weekly via Zoom earlier in November. “We’re all adults. This is what people do. But the one thing that’s interesting, and what I think hopefully works about the scenes, is the emotional journey of each character. That’s what we wanted to convey. I think that’s the reason is why they work.”

Foreign focuses on 1950s Mexico City, where Lee, along with like-minded expats, is free to have same-sex relationships as well as healthy affairs involving heroin, alcohol and other substances. He becomes fixated on Eugene Allerton (Outdoor benchesDrew Starkey), a younger man who is apparently exploring his bisexuality for the first time. The film, directed by Call me by your name‘s Luca Guadagnino and written by him Challengers writer Justin Kuritzkes, depicts multiple intimate flesh-on-flesh contacts between the men as Lee takes them to Latin America in search of a drug called yage, better known as ayahuasca.

Starkey casually embodies Eugene’s chic sex appeal, even fully clothed, but the actor takes no credit for that. He remembers a moment later Foreign‘s premiere at the Venice Film Festival where Celine Strong, Kuritzkes’ wife and the director of the Oscar nominee Past livesapproached him. “She said, ‘You’ve never looked like that in a movie, have you?’” Starkey recalled in a separate interview with EW. “I thought, ‘No! I don’t know what it is.'” The answer Strong gave him was Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, the cameraman. “Sayombhu lights for people, not for scenes,” she told Starkey.

As for the sex scenes themselves, “I think people enjoy asking about that kind of thing,” says Starkey, “but it’s certainly not provocative to be provocative in any way. Luca wanted everything to be infused with meaning and would lead with love. And it’s true. It’s just two people having a strange, loving relationship and working through it.

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Most of what they wanted to achieve with the intimate sequences, including Lee’s desire to be so close to Eugene that they establish a telepathic connection, was already written into Kuritzkes’ script, Starkey notes. “Me, Luca and Daniel had extensive conversations about it and how we wanted it to feel, and about the music of it and the dancing,” the actor continues. “So by the time we started shooting it, it felt like we had already planned it to some extent. There’s only so much you can plan. Then you just shoot it and see what happens.”

“In meeting together to make the film, we both agreed that with this film we would be entering a very profound space, an emotional space,” Guadagnino says of his conversations with Craig. “So whether it’s injecting heroin, drinking and being a narrator, or ultimately letting the body collide with the other person’s body, it was all about a deep commitment to what this character had to go through and be. That’s it, I think. Of course it may sound very simple. That is not easy, because there is one factor that is not there 90 percent of the time, and that is the sensitivity, the intelligence and the playfulness of the artists who want to perform something that is for the average. (performer) seems exaggerated. When you do it from a behavioral perspective, everything becomes very natural and very deep, even though we are playing.”

Guadagnino first read Burroughs’ Foreign around the age of 17, a particularly ‘prudent’ time in his life, the filmmaker emphasizes. He describes the experience as “an act of defiance against myself,” in that he sought out more complicated literature even though he would have difficulty understanding the material. Years later, with the film adaptation, Guadagnino hoped he came away with a “compassionate understanding that at the heart of the book is about the fragility of Burroughs’s emotional life.”

Craig had no such reading experience, but he did immerse himself in Kuritzkes’ screenplay, as well as the novella, and felt that his instincts matched what Guadagnino wanted to achieve. “I saw this very complicated, emotional character in the book that I thought would just be a joy to take on and really try to create,” says the actor.

In terms of this ‘provocative’ description and the Turkish ban on the film, Guadagnino has some concerns. “Nobody would argue that there are a lot of people jumping off roofs and onto motorcycles at high speed when we make a big action movie,” says the director. “But when you make a big emotional film about contact, we have to reemphasize the need to portray that in every possible way the way we need to.”

Foreign plays in select theaters on November 27.