Sophia Michaels
Call Me By Your Name director Luca Guadagnino says the timing of his upcoming cannibal love story move Bones & All and allegations of Armie Hammer’s cannibalism fetish is purely coincidental.
“It didn’t dawn on me. I realized this afterward when I started to be told of some of these innuendos on social media,” Guadagnino said in a new interview with Deadline.
“Any link with anything else exists only in the realm of social media, with which I do not engage. The relationship between this kind of digital muckraking and our wish to make this movie is non-existent, and it should be met with a shrug. I would prefer to talk about what the film has to say, rather than things that have nothing to do with it.”
Hammer’s cannibalism-fueled fantasies first came to light in Jan. 2021 amid a wave of allegations of sexual misconduct against the actor. However, as Guadagnino told Deadline, his adaptation of Bones & All — a “horror love story” about two teenage cannibals based on a 2016 book — had been in the works since soon after the novel’s publication, well predating the allegations against Hammer.
Timothée Chalamet, Hammer’s co-star in Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name, stars in the leading role in Bones & All. Up until the accusations against Hammer, Guadagnino had been planning on making a sequel to that 2017 film with both actors; however, the sequel has since been shelved (and — given Hammer’s situation — perhaps permanently) for other projects, like Bones & All.
Guadagnino reiterated of people tying his new film and the Hammer accusations together, “The muckraking of social media doesn’t address anything constructively, and the idea that this very profoundly important fight for equality can be misdirected in this way is something that frustrates me greatly.”
