Guess which Call Me By Your Name character is getting a follow-up from Luca Guadagnino
Chances are you guessed correctly, though the director claims sequels are "an American concept"
Against all odds, Luca Guadagnino is still planning on making another film in the Call Me By Your Name cinematic universe. There were, of course, two characters that drove the 2017 film’s central romance; can you guess which one is getting the sequel treatment?
First, we must be clear that according to Guadagnino, “A sequel is an American concept.” Instead, he says in an interview at the Telluride Film Festival (per IndieWire), “It’s more like the chronicles of Elio, the chronicles of this young boy becoming a man. It is something I want to do.” So yeah: it’s the one who led the cannibalism movie, not the one who actually got accused of cannibalism.
Presumably, Timothée Chalamet will be embodying this coming-of-age story sans his first love, Oliver, played by Armie Hammer. This would be a departure from Guadagnino’s original plans, which were paused due to the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. Back then, the filmmaker had recruited a screenwriter and was promising to reunite the original cast. (André Aicman’s sequel to the original novel, released in 2019, saw Elio pursue a different relationship before reuniting with Oliver.)
One cannibal controversy and a suspiciously timed (though well received) cannibal film later, and it looks like Oliver is being left out of the CMBYN “chronicles.” (Does the plural suggest more than one follow-up in the works?) Even without Hammer’s steep fall from grace (which was not just about his outrageous kinks, but also an alleged pattern of domestic abuse), Chalamet has obviously become a key muse for Guadagnino.
“It’s not as if I left Timothée at the height of his booming success, and then I found him four years later. We kept close. I knew that there was not much time to wait until we worked together, but only for the right project,” he tells IndieWire of his Bones And All star. “To see the humbleness and rigor with which he made his first steps toward stardom—this bright, feverish young man became this planetary star—made me so proud. There is a very beautiful bond between [him and] me.”