Drew Starkey on the End of ‘Outer Banks,’ His Wild New Action Movie, and Seeking Out What Scares Him

With a spate of edgy new projects on deck, the now-former teen-TV antihero is ready to grow out the buzz cut and show the world what else he’s capable of.Drew Starkey wants the strongest, most caffeinated drink on the menu.We’re in the frilly back room of New York’s Whitby Hotel for afternoon tea, all salmon-pink walls and floral-printed upholstery and Upper East Side moms brunching in long sundresses. Amongst the fanciness and the fussiness, Starkey is the single sharp object in the room. His sandy hair is short and spiky. The snug hoop in his left ear matches the big silver Dior belt buckle he’s paired with baggy, beat-up Dickies; it’s a fresh-off-the-runway-Jonathan Anderson meets Hinge-date-who-Venmo-requests-you-afterward outfit combination. “I think it encapsulates me pretty well as a person,” Starkey says, when I point it out.After taking the waiter’s word that oolong is the most caffeinated drink he could possibly acquire, Starkey pours tiny teacup after tiny teacup from his tiny porcelain pot, the handle nearly too small for his grip. He was out late in the East Village last night with his sister and needs the energy boost, although when the waiter suggests the tea course that includes Champagne and caviar, he votes yes right away.This is my third time chatting with Starkey. As he reclines on an ostentatious pile of throw pillows (not two, not three, but four), it feels like we’re catching up in a mutual friend’s living room. The actor is exactly the kind of guy you hope you get stuck talking to at a party; he has a dry sense of humor and is quick to recommend music (ML Buch is high in his rotation at the moment) or pull up a photo on his phone to show you that time he dyed his hair blue and it ended up a horrible green instead.The North Carolina native has spent the year jumping between back-to-back shoots, but his schedule is about to open up in a way it hasn’t for seven years, since he signed on to Outer Banks, the Netflix show that catapulted him into nearly overnight fame. For the moment, Starkey is embarking on three press tours at once: for Lucky, the Apple TV series in which he plays Anya Taylor-Joy’s husband, Cary, the son of a Mob boss; for Outer Banks, which is gearing up to drop its hotly anticipated fifth and final season on August 20; and for Onslaught, a wild, freaky A24 slasher-action film directed by Adam Wingard, which opens in early September.Vintage t-shirt from the Society Archive. Earring (throughout), his own.In Wingard’s movie, Starkey plays an MDMA’d-up government agent called in to work on his night off (and away from a BDSM sex party) to clean up the bloody mess of a military experiment gone wrong. He was drawn to the weirdness and the wildness of his character—to prepare for the role, he read a bunch of Aleister Crowley books, and in talks about his character’s look, he volunteered to fully shave his eyebrows.“In every single scene that we shot, there was always one extra thing that Drew would do that just took the scene up to another level,” says Wingard, who’d never worked with Starkey before but now cites him as one of his favorite actors. “That’s what I want out of actors: I want actors that can bring something to the role that I’m not expecting.” He thinks Starkey is on the cusp of becoming a big-movie leading man—“one of those guys.” “There’s just a real charm and charisma that he has looming over him that I think, to me, represents what a future mega movie star looks like,” he says. “You can just feel that aura on him.”Jeans by Ann Demeulemeester.Starkey secured his place in the film without an audition, which is how he’s booked his most prominent roles as of late, including Luca Guadagnino’s 2024 drama Queer. Taylor-Joy, also an executive producer on Lucky, says she hand-selected him to play Cary: “It was Christmastime, and the team and I had been talking Carys for a while,” she tells me via email, “but none had felt quite right. I sat down with my family to watch Queer, and boom, there he was. It was a gut feeling.”In a post–Outer Banks world, with no contractual obligations on deck, every avenue is opening up for Starkey. “A free agent,” he calls himself. “LeBron James. I have no fucking clue, and I think that’s what’s exciting about it, is I really don’t have any idea what it’s going to look like. It’s pretty scary. It’s pretty terrifying.”Usually, this is the time of year Starkey would be heading back to Charleston, South Carolina, to shoot another season of Outer Banks. Instead, he’s slathering clotted cream and jam on a chamomile-and-apricot scone (“Goddamn—this scone is fucking me up”) and pondering what comes next.For five seasons on the Netflix series, he was Rafe Cameron: a sneaky thief and a good liar on his best days, and a downright murderous villain on his worst. While Starkey and his former streaming alter ego couldn’t be more different—he never fails to say please and thank you every time something is brought to our table—his empathy for Rafe rivals the deep feelings expressed in the think pieces Rafe’s fans churn out on the internet.“I think he is a person who deserves love,” says Starkey. “He needs to be seen to make him feel seen and understood. He always felt just like a black sheep. So yeah, I’m proud of him. I think he did the best he could.”“He still needs to go to therapy,” he adds.Sweater by Emily Lawn Dong. T-shirt by the Society Archive. Jeans by Ann Demeulemeester.For all the character’s flaws, Rafe apologists still make up a healthy subset of the OBX fandom. Fancams dedicated to the character have accrued millions of likes and tens of millions of views. It helped that he got a really good buzz cut in season three: “Something shifted in the ether,” says Starkey of the hairdo.“Drew made people empathize with someone they probably shouldn’t have empathized with,” Outer Banks co-creator and director Jonas Pate tells me via email. “That’s not because he softened Rafe or made him more likable. If anything, he committed even harder to the ugly parts. But he always let you see the scared kid underneath the monster. Audiences are remarkably good at sensing truth, and Drew gave them that.”Starkey, for his part, is ready to let go—of the polo shirts and Ray-Bans and perpetual tan, the progressively wilder and wilder treasure hunts that the OBX crew embarked on year after year, even that buzz cut he’s had to return to every summer. He jokes about growing out a bob. “Next time I see you,” he threatens, “you’re going to be like, ‘Look at that mane.’”Starkey will not, he hopes, become one of those jaded actors who downplay the teen show they came up on after moving to bigger things. He’s proud of the work he did on OBX and feels confident the series will be remembered fondly.“I’ve loved, loved, loved my experience on that show,” he says. “I was a wreck on my last day. I was crying so much. I felt guilty, because I was feeling nothing leading up to it. I was like, ‘I’m glad it’s over.’ And then all of a sudden, after my last scene, they yelled cut and I was just like, waterworks, weeping. I think I cried the most out of anyone.”What he’s looking for now, he says, is “something as far away from myself as possible.” The projects he’s most drawn to are the ones that don’t make sense to him. Something strange, something off-kilter, something that scares him.Shirt by Dior.Pate, for one, has an idea about where Starkey’s future lies.“I keep waiting for someone to cast Drew as the hero,” Pate says. “Not the antihero. Not the damaged guy. Just the guy you want to follow into the fire. He has all the tools for it. When that happens, people are going to realize they’ve only been watching one chapter of what he’s capable of.”When we’re about halfway through our tower of pastries and tea sandwiches, a young woman timidly approaches our table. “I’m so sorry to bother you two,” she says, shifting from foot to foot. “My little sister is pretty convinced that you’re Drew Starkey. Are you Drew?”Starkey, with a warmer disposition than anyone could hope for when approaching a celebrity in the wild, confirms it is, in fact, him. He waves the little sister over, smiles sweetly for a photo with her, asks where she’s visiting from, wishes her well in her imminent start to the 10th grade. “That’s a good big sister,” he says when he slides back into our booth. Later, as their whole family leaves the restaurant, he makes sure to call out a “Bye, y’all! Nice to meet you!” before they go.Jeans by Dior. Sunglasses by Oakley.Clearly, fame follows Starkey wherever he goes—whether it’s welcome or not. He’s seen fan edits of himself, he admits, but says doing so “makes him feel sick,” likening it to the unpleasantness of hearing the sound of your own voice. He knows people thirst after him on all corners of the internet, brushes it off with pink ears when I mention it. “I duck my head and hide,” he says. “But it is flattering.”And, Starkey confesses, he doesn’t love doing press, either. “I don’t really like attention. I don’t like people watching me,” he says.Well, Drew—you’re an actor.“It’s a strange paradox,” he explains. “I feel very comfortable when I have the vehicle of a character to express myself. It’s something you get to hide behind. That’s fine, because it’s not me. But whenever it’s me doing this, I get quite shy. I just don’t think I’m a good salesman, and I don’t like talking about myself that much.”Watch by Audemar Piguet.There is, I point out, an irony to the whole cycle: The more projects he does, the more press he does, and the more famous he becomes, all of which in turn begets more projects, more press, and more fame. Ideally, he says, the projects he does in the future won’t catapult him into an echelon of stardom he can’t come back from. “If I can stay at this level, that’d be great. But who knows?”This upcoming break in his work provides an opportunity to recalibrate, to figure out how to to balance being Drew Starkey, Person with being Drew Starkey, Actor.“I finished this last film, and there’s that feeling of never wanting to step foot on a movie set again,” he says. “It takes so much out of me. I have to really invest every part of myself into it. And so by the end, I feel like a shell of a human being. I feel so exhausted. It’s some weird accepted form of schizophrenia or something. You’re pretending to be someone for two months that isn’t you, and then by the end of it—through some process of osmosis or something, I don’t know—you just hold on to emotions and feelings that aren’t yours.”Shirt by Tom Ford.Starkey’s unbridled dedication to the craft is, of course, particularly taxing if you consistently take on the kinds of roles that he does, which usually feature at least one or two scenes where he’s soaked in blood.“I think I treat it like a sport in a lot of ways, where I’m in competition with myself, which is not the approach you want when you’re trying to do something creative,” says Starkey. He’s hoping to use some of his free-agent time to process why his self-worth is so attached to his work: “I think regardless of what the project is, I still come out of it feeling like I went through hell.”At least on the morning we meet, Starkey’s hero moment seems like it might arrive sooner rather than later—before I head out to the Whitby, my timeline is buzzing with rumors that Starkey’s in talks to join the MCU as Cyclops in the next X-Men movie. “I’m super open to stuff, to MCU, DCU,” he says. “I think it’d be cool.” (The following week, however, the part goes to Heartstopper’s Kit Connor.)Pants by Visvim.But he’s also stretching in other directions. For Deep Cuts, a forthcoming A24 film adapted from Holly Brickley’s novel about a music-obsessed couple, Starkey learned to sing and play guitar and piano, a process he describes as “super challenging.” Then there’s Jeff Nichols’s King Snake, with Margaret Qualley; it's reportedly a horror movie, although Starkey describes it as “a love story between these two people with some supernatural elements at play.”With our time together winding down, I check him on the rumor that he might be reteaming with Guadagnino on the director’s adaptation of American Psycho. “No comment,” Starkey replies, then adds, “The script is amazing, though.”“Oh, so you’ve read the script?”A pause. “Fuck!” he says, laughing, then qualifies: “I’ve read the script, but Luca’s my friend. I think I’ve read all of his scripts.”Hoodie by Toteme. Shorts by Nahmias. Sneakers by Converse.It's not until a waiter appears to clear our table that we realize we’ve left the tiny tins of caviar tragically untouched all afternoon. Now they’re floating in sad puddles of melted ice, and there’s only one thing to do. Starkey reaches for a tin and passes me the paper bag of blini. Only as we begin smearing crème fraîche onto them with little ivory spoons does Starkey admit, “I don’t even fuck with caviar, really.”“I don’t either,” I agree.“Why are we doing this?”“I don’t know.”“It’s for the experience. Let’s do this,” he says, cheerses my blini with his, and sends it down the hatch, demonstrating just how risk-averse he’s ready to get.“I can’t remember,” he says, “if I’m allergic to caviar or not. Do you feel your throat getting scratchy?”PRODUCTION CREDITS:Photography by Bowen FernieStyled by Haley GilbreathGrooming by Melissa De Zarate using Allies of SkinTailoring by Ksenia GolubSign up for Manual to receive useful advice on style, health, and more, five days a week.Trishna Rikhy is the associate social media manager at GQ, where she covers fashion and entertainment. Previously, she has written for Vogue, Paper, and V, and covered menswear and culture for Esquire. She has interviewed A$AP Rocky, Jeff Goldblum, Adrien Brody, Drew Starkey, Kid Cudi, Logan Lerman, and more. She ... Read More