VENICE LIDO, Italy – Playing gay has been good for Daniel Craig.

The blue-eyed Brit is again in the Oscar mix for his fully committed work as the titular alcoholic in next week’s “Queer,” an adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ slim novel.

He’s recently filmed the third “Knives Out” murder mystery series, reprising the stylish, Southern gay sleuth Benoit Blanc.

It was his electrifying work as tormented, often nude George Dyer, the blue collar hunk who inspired Francis Bacon in the 1998 “Love is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon,” that proved to be his breakthrough.

That art film about the tormented relationship between one of the 20th century’s great painters, a millionaire, and the lower class Dyer, who eventually killed himself, rates among the gayest of love stories. It made Craig a star who’s subsequently remained loyal to his gay audience.

If in “Queer” he doesn’t reprise “Love is the Devil” and go full frontal, the love scenes between Craig’s alcoholic drug addict William Lee and the much younger, possibly gay Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey of “Love, Simon”) could not be more explicitly intense.

Adapting “Queer” for film was the pet project of “The Challengers” and “Call Me By Your Name” director, Italy’s Luca Guadagnino, 53, who was 17 when he first read the Burroughs book .

Unforgettable, he said, was “the profound connection he was achingly describing on the page between these two characters” along with the author’s “complete lack of judgement” about these flawed characters who stumble, stoned and drunk, through life. Or in this case 1950s Mexico City.

To establish their relationship — the older, moneyed American escaping criminal charges in the States and the younger drug addict discharged from the Navy — Craig, 56, and Starkey, 31, began rehearsing long before filming.

“There is nothing intimate about filming a sex scene on a movie set. You have a lot of people watching you,” Craig noted. “We just wanted to make it as touching and as natural as we possibly could. Dancing with someone is a great ice breaker.”

His research meant also watching Burroughs being interviewed. “He had this persona — and when I thought about that, I thought, We have to find that other person! That really was the thing.”

Reading “Queer,” he said, “is this emotional thump. It is about love. It’s loss, loneliness and yearning.

“The reason I did this movie is Luca. I look at this movie and if I saw this movie, I’d want to be in it. It’s the kind of films I want to make. They’re out there, challenging.

“The challenge of playing Lee? It was just talking.”

“Queer” opens Dec. 6