Drew Starkey didn't audition for Luca Guadagnino's "Queer" — instead, the project found him.

The 30-year-old “Outer Banks” star was submitting self-tapes for several other projects when Guadagnino saw one of Starkey’s from a producer friend. Then Starkey got a call that the “Challengers” and “Call Me by Your Name” director would like to have breakfast with him.

“I was like, ‘OK, that’s insane,’” Starkey tells Variety over Zoom from his home in L.A., sporting a cropped haircut and mustache, his black T-shirt contrasting with a psychedelic painting backdrop. In the months that followed, the two ate more meals together as Guadagnino laid out his vision for “Queer,” his adaptation of the 1985 novel by Beat Generation writer William S. Burroughs. Starkey eventually settled on Eugene Allerton, a drug-addicted, discharged Marine with whom Daniel Craig’s William Lee falls in love in 1940s Mexico City — and got the part.

"It felt very organic. That's not usually how it works," Starkey says. "But I think it's such a testament to — Luca really wants to get to know his actors as well as he can, not just from a performance standpoint, but from a human standpoint. And I didn't care if anything came of it — I thought, 'Great, I get to sit down and have conversations with a director and an artist that I look up to and admire. What a beautiful thing.'"