Fans of Call Me By Your Name, one of the most beloved LGBTQ movies of all time, were excited to hear of another collaboration between that film's star, Timothée Chalamet, and its director, Luca Guadagnino. However, one key member of the CMBYN cast was not included in the new project: Armie Hammer.
Hammer, who played Oliver opposite Chalamet's Elio in the 2017 Oscar-winning romance, has been embroiled in scandal for the better part of two years after alleged text messages from the actor leaked online referencing extreme BDSM play and even cannibalistic fantasies, as well as further accusations of physical and psychological abuse.
So it seemed suspiciously ironic that the new joint effort from Guadagnino and Chalamet—titled Bones and All and based on the Camille DeAngelis novel of the same name—is a romantic horror movie following two teenage cannibals on a road trip in the 1980s. Per the official synopsis, the film is "a story of first love between Maren (Taylor Russell), a young woman learning how to survive on the margins of society, and Lee (Timothée Chalamet), an intense and disenfranchised drifter, as they meet and join together for a thousand-mile odyssey which takes them through the back roads, hidden passages, and trap doors of Ronald Reagan's America”.
Adding to the irony, Bones and All will premiere at the Venice International Film Festival on Friday, September 2, the same day the Armie Hammer documentary, House of Hammer, will drop on Discovery+, a three-episode docuseries detailing Hammer's fall from grace and family history.
But is the new film at all connected to the Armie Hammer cannibal rumors? Here's what we know.
Is 'Bones and All' about Armie Hammer?
"It didn’t dawn on me. I realized this afterward when I started to be told of some of these innuendos on social media," Luca Guadagnino told Deadline of the connection between his new film and Hammer's scandal.
"This project—which was a popular book—had been in development for a number of years before Dave Kajganich brought it to me in 2020. I responded immediately to these characters who are disenfranchised and living on the edge of society. Any link with anything else exists only in the realm of social media, with which I do not engage," the director continued. "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."
After the popularity and critical acclaim of Call Me By Your Name, there was much chatter over the potential of Hammer, Chalamet and Guadagnino reuniting for a sequel. (Author André Aciman released a follow-up to his novel Call Me By Your Name in 2019 called Find Me.) However, what with everything that transpired in the past few years with Hammer, as well Chalamet's busy filming schedule, Guadagnino has since tempered any sequel talk.
“The truth of the matter is, my heart is still there, but I’m working on this movie now, and I’m hopefully going to do Scarface soon, and I have many projects and so will focus on this side of the Atlantic and the movies I want to make," he told Deadline last year.
