Drew Starkey: 9 More Roles He Played Before Outer Banks And Queer

Drew Starkey’s star is definitely on the rise.

The US actor first became an international heartthrob when he appeared in the Netflix adventure drama Outer Banks as Rafe Cameron. After that, he proved himself to be far more than a YA drama star when he was cast alongside Daniel Craig in Luca Guadagnino’s Queer and, more recently, in the Apple TV+ crime drama Lucky.

With Netflix having recently unveiled the final season of Outer Banks, Drew has plenty more projects in the pipeline, further cementing his place as one of Hollywood’s most exciting young actors.

In the next two years, Drew will appear with Dan Stevens in the science fiction drama Onslaught, play an aspiring musician in Deep Cuts and star with Margaret Qualley in Gothic horror King Snake.

But long before he was an in-demand film star, Drew was a working actor with smaller supporting roles on film and TV.

Here are nine roles you may well have totally forgotten Drew Starkey once played…

One of Drew’s earliest big-screen roles came when he played Garrett Laughlin in Love, Simon.

The teen rom-com centred around a closeted teenage boy who is threatened with being outed to his entire high school by an anonymous blackmailer. All the while, he’s also trying to find the identity of his classmate with whom he’s fallen in love online.

Drew played Garrett, one of Simon’s school friends, who often sat with the main gang during lunch, as well as hanging out with them at a house party.

That same year, Drew played Brian MacIntosh Jr. in the coming-of-age drama The Hate U Give, which starred Amandla Stenberg as a high school student coping after witnessing her friend being killed in a police shooting.

Drew played a police officer who shot the teenager after mistaking her hairbrush for a gun.

The drama – based on the Angie Thomas novel of the same name – was met with mostly positive reviews, and co-starred Riverdale’s KJ Apa, One Battle After Another star Regina Hall and future pop sensation Sabrina Carpenter.

Drew played a minor role in Just Mercy, which starred Michael B Jordan as the real-life lawyer and civil rights activist Brian Stevenson, who represented Black prisoners on death row in the South of the USA.

Just Mercy was another project in which Drew played a police officer, mirroring his work in The Hate U Give a year earlier. He appeared briefly in the 2019 film, in a scene in which he tried to block a group of people from entering a public hearing.

The positively reviewed film also co-starred Jamie Foxx, Rafe Spall and Tim Blake Nelson, with Mark Kermode writing in The Guardian that the drama was a “movingly matter-of-fact account of one man’s struggle to lend voice to the silenced”.

Drew made a brief appearance as a criminal named Tim in the first season of the TV series Doom Patrol.

The show starred Brendan Fraser, Diane Guerrero and Matt Bomer as an unlikely team of superheroes, who gain their powers in a series of tragic incidents.

In his episode, Drew played a low-level robber whose heist goes wrong when an ATM came to life and started talking to him.

Despite airing in the golden age of superhero media, Doom Patrol didn’t make much of an impact at the time, and has since been described in the press “criminally underrated”.

In 2015, MTV revived the Scream franchise as an anthology TV show.

Starring the likes of Keke Palmer, Tyler Posey and Willa Fitzgerald, the show followed a group of teenagers who were stalked by a masked serial killer.

Four years later, it was brought back for a third and final series, titled Scream: Resurrection, which introduced footballer Deion Elliot, played by RJ Cyler, as he was tormented by Ghostface and his own hidden skeletons.

Drew appeared in four episodes of the horror show as Hawkins, Deion’s friend and teammate, who was secretly involved romantically with another openly gay student at his high school.

Drew had a minor role in the Netflix crime drama The Devil All The Time, which starred Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson and Bill Skarsgård.

Spanning several decades in two rural towns in Ohio and West Virginia, the post-World War II crime drama centred on orphaned Arvin Russell, played by the Spider-Man actor, as he encountered corrupt cops, sinister preachers and a local serial killer.

Drew had a minor role as Tommy Matson, a member of the gang of youths who harassed and tormented Arvin’s stepsister, Lenora, played by Eliza Scanlen, until Tom’s character had to step in.

Embattled starred Stephen Dorff as a reigning mixed martial arts fighter, who was forced to confront his family’s abusive legacy after his son, played by Darren Mann, chose to follow in his MMA footsteps.

Drew played a minor role in the sports film as Tanner Van Holt, who gets into an altercation with the aspiring fighter.

With around two minutes of screen time, it’s a role so minor it’s certainly not worth fans of the actor seeking out especially for him. However, the film does have a 70% score on Rotten Tomatoes, with The Guardian calling Embattled “part classic montage-showdown sports movie, part southern gothic Oedipal family drama”.

The 11th instalment in the Hellraiser franchise starred Odessa A’zion as Riley, a woman recovering from addiction, who found a puzzle box that summoned masochistic humanoids, much like the franchise’s original villain Pinhead.

In what was, at that time, one of his biggest film roles to date, Drew played Trevor, Riley’s no-good boyfriend who she met in a recovery programme.

The movie, which acted as a reboot as well as a sequel, starred Jamie Clayton, Brandon Flynn and Aoife Hinds.

The horror film also received praise for opening up numerous conversations about representation and the connection between gender and the horror genre thanks to the casting of trans actor Jamie Clayton as Pinhead.

Drew’s last film role before Queer, which helped him graduate from small roles and young adult projects into a more serious name in Hollywood, was the Amazon Prime rom-com The Other Zoey.

In the movie, Drew played a college soccer star whose amnesia leads to him mistaking computer major Zoey, played by Josephine Langford, for his girlfriend (also called Zoey).

Despite the cringe-y plot setup, the rom-com had surprisingly good reviews, with Variety calling it “a pleasant enough diversion for those who want familiar genre beats sounded by the usual attractive actors in the customary attractive settings”.

All five seasons of Outer Banks are now streaming on Netflix.