As Daniel Craig has been promoting his upcoming A24 film Queer, he’s been asked a lot about the sex scenes he shares with Drew Starkey, because the film from Luca Guadagnino focuses on an intimate romantic relationship between two men. Throughout the movie, there are quite a few sex and nude scenes, including one that takes place outdoors in the dirt. However, the dirt was actually coffee grounds. Turns out, there was an unexpected consequence to shooting said moment in coffee grounds, and the James Bond actor shared the story behind why.
While discussing the release of Queer on The Graham Norton Show, Craig broke down this wild, dancing, nude scene that he shared with the Outer Banks star. Setting the scene by describing the backlot they were filming on, he said they were going to perform the sequence on gravel at first. However, it quickly became clear that that wasn’t the best idea:
There’s a sequence where we do a dance — I won’t give the game away, but there’s a dance in the movie. We were doing it outside on the backlot, and it was just ground — it was gravel — and we had to sort of roll around for like two nights. I was like, ‘We’re gonna get cut to pieces.’ We’re naked in the scene.
Now, I saw Queer ahead of its premiere on the 2024 movie schedule, and I know which moment Daniel Craig is referring to. However, I don’t want to spoil anything. So, here are the basics: as the actor noted, he and Drew Starkey are naked in the scene, they do a very involved dance while nude, and it’s done in the jungle. I would imagine that filming it in gravel would indeed be painful. So, finding an alternative was the right move.
That alternative though, had consequences, because the coffee grounds that replaced the gravel ended up making him feel like he drank coffee, as the Knives Out star explained:
Someone very kindly said, ‘That’s not gonna work. We’re gonna be bleeding. It’s not gonna be very good for the scene.’ So we got back the following night, and someone had put like 50 pounds of coffee grounds down on the ground, so it looked like dirt. Which is great — soft and lovely. But you can absorb it through your skin. So by 6 o’clock in the morning, which was a night shoot, you’re like, [jitters] ‘Yeah, goodnight!’
Immediately after Craig said that, Jesse Eisenberg – who was also a guest on the show alongside Nicola Coughlan and Kieran Culkin – enthusiastically asked if that was actually true. I had the same question.
According to the National Library of Medicine, caffeine can be absorbed through the skin, as a study about the “permeation of topically applied caffeine through human skin” detected it in volunteers’ blood five minutes after it was applied.
So, I assume Craig is correct, and he likely was jittery because the coffee grounds had gotten into his system after hours of rolling around in them. While that doesn’t sound great, on the bright side, since this was a night shoot, at least they had a little pick me up, albeit an unexpected and unconventional one.
With all that said and done, if you are looking to see Queer and this scene Daniel Craig was describing, you can catch the Luca Guadagnino film in theaters now.