Call Me By Your Name, the film adaptation of the Andre Aciman novel starring Armie Hammer and Timothee Chalamet and directed by Luca Guadagnino, was a critical rave at Sundance, and snatched up quickly in January by Sony Pictures Classics.
Hammer plays the story’s “24-year old American scholar spending the summer of 1983 in Northern Italy, where he attracts the attention of a 17-year-old Jewish-American boy, played by Timothee Chalamet.”
It premiered this week at the Toronto International Film Festival to a standing ovation.
Hammer said he almost turned down the role, according to The Hollywood Reporter:
“I did want to pass. I did want to pass. It scared me. I was a little nervous about all the nudity that was originally in the script. And I had images of my daughter being at school, and she’s 13 years old, and people are teasing her and printing out pictures of my penis and, I thought, ‘Oh man!'”
Hammer added that he thought the movie would provide a needed break from the world we’re in right now:
“It’s a crazy, bizarre, weird and scary world, and anytime you can infuse a little bit of beauty and remind people that, yes, things might be terrible somewhere else, … but you will feel like you’re having a summer vacation if you watch this movie, and just that bit of escapism can be nice too.”
This week, Entertainment Weekly debuted five minutes from the newly-recorded audiobook from the Aciman novel, read by Hammer.
Listen, below:
Here’s a clip from the film released earlier this year.
