Calling Him By My Name [Armie Hammer + Timothée Chalamet | Charmie | mxb]

1 | Armie

The day of my arrival in Crema, Italy, I meet with director Luca Guadagnino in a restaurant not far from the seventeenth-century villa where we'll be shooting. We talk about the long and winding road that finally culminated in the making of this movie, why he sought me out as an actor, as well as his vision and goals as they pertain to first preproduction and then the shoot. He lays on the table right off the bat that he doesn't care about common perception or preconceived notions of Call Me By Your Name; he isn't interesting in making a gay movie.

"I am making movie about people," he stresses, voice laden with a heavy Italian accent as he gesticulates emphatically. Luca then launches into a monologue about embracing the other in its otherness, or some such next-level shit, dark eyes gleaming with the almost crazed enthusiasm of a man who truly lives and breathes his craft.

I nod sagely throughout. I met with the middle-aged Italian man almost a decade ago at my home in LA, and although I try to keep up with him for the most part, I quickly came to accept that my intellectual capacity just isn't sufficiently advanced to understand what he's saying half the time. He speaks five different languages, has something like thirty years of filmmaking under his belt, and is critically acclaimed as an artistic genius of the industry. He has such an epicurean way of flowing through the ether that it's abundantly clear why he's the perfect director for this movie.

After what feels like a small millennium of contributing nothing but nods and murmurs of assent, I finally burst out with:

"Alright, where's Timmy?"

Luca regards me warily for a beat.

"Uh, he is in piano lesson..."

"Cool, where?"

"In building over..." Luca makes a vague hand gesture in the direction of the building and, ah yes, I remember passing it on my way to the apartment earlier. "But-"

"Perfect, thanks." I grab my bag from under the table and prepare to take off.

Luca appears scandalized.

"Wait, you cannot just interrupt-"

I don't catch the rest, having already slapped a few bills on the table and booked it for the exit.

It's three weeks before filming starts. My costar, Timothée, flew here from New York a month and a half in advance, so he's already been in the small Italian town for three weeks, acclimatizing and immersing himself in the culture, but also preparing for his role in the movie. The preproduction process for becoming the wonder-kid Elio Perlman must be an intense one, involving a shit-ton of music and language lessons.

I've never met him before, never read or screened or auditioned with him. All I know about the casting is what I've gleaned from my wife's excited ramblings. She thinks this is the sexiest book she's ever read, and that I'd better do it justice. I remember her telling me that Timothée Chalamet is twenty-one, straight, and lives in New York - that's it. Well, and that I'd better not fuck up this movie.

So then.

Time to meet the other straight dude I'll be sucking face with for a month.

"Hey, Timmy," I exclaim, barging into what I hope is the right room, "it's Armie!"

A dark-haired boy immediately turns in his seat on the piano stool, and I get a look at my scene partner for the first time.