In the old days of the Hollywood studio system, Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet would have comprised alternate polarities of the star spectrum. In an about-shift that tells you as much about the changing temperature of the film world as it does the curiosity and confidence of the two leads of Call Me By Your Name (a confidence they both say they found under director Luca Guadagnino’s instruction), Hammer and Chalamet have travelled the independent route to bring to intimate life this year’s unassailable star-crossed lovers.

On a sunny summer New York afternoon Armie Hammer bowls into a sleek loft around the corner from The Empire State Building. His presence is felt immediately. Hammer is 6’5” tall, broad, tanned with size US15 shoes – a detail men rarely mind sharing. He is probably most famous for playing the Winklevoss twins in the first great film to document the seismic shifts of the digital age, David Fincher’s The Social Network. ‘They needed a 6’5” actor. There aren’t many of us around,’ Hammer explains.

Hammer looks like a Ralph Lauren ad sprung to life. He wears his imposing stature comfortably. He’s a personable fellow who falls socially into the same relaxed strata of intelligent goof you’d slot Channing Tatum. Perhaps because he has such a noticeably American disposition, he was taken with Italian director Guadagnino from the outset when he first met him in Los Angeles some years before they made magic together. ‘He was coming into town for meetings,’ says Hammer of Guadagnino. ‘He’s like the perfect epicurean European,’ the actor notes. ‘He was really amazing.’ Guadagnino’s CV includes I Am Love (2010) and A Bigger Splash (2015); he has shot fashion ads for Armani and Ferragamo. ‘From the way he prepares coffee to the way everything is done, you’re just like, this is chic.’

© Giampaolo Sgura

Timothée Chalamet is the inverse to Hammer’s towering, statuesque physique. He’s a slip of a thing, barely there. Like his opposite in Guadagnino’s astonishing forthcoming feature, Call Me By Your Name, Chalamet has a sharp and enthusiastic presence with a performer’s instinct on how to fill a room. It was 2013, in the wake of his taciturn performance as Dana Brody’s surly, disruptive High School boyfriend in Homeland that Timothée Chalamet first answered Guadagnino’s call. ‘Before this would’ve been a thing, it was in the lobby of whatever the Trump building is on 59th,’ he recalls. ‘I was just grateful that he’d asked for the meeting.’ At the time, he was 17 years old.

Hammer and Chalamet are both education dropouts, the latter from Columbia University, the former never even making it to college. Their backgrounds otherwise could not be more different. Hammer is thoroughbred West Coast beefcake, an LA resident, the great-grandson of one of the founders of the American Communist party and grandson of an extreme capitalist. His most resonant childhood home was on the idyllic Cayman Islands. ‘I had a dirt-bike that I would ride around. I had a machete. I know how to cut down a coconut and clean out a papaya. I got the Robinson Crusoe experience, basically.’ Chalamet, the son of a French father and mother who works for the actor’s union, Equity, was attending intense theatre productions (‘12, 15 a year’) on the family doorstep in Hell’s Kitchen when had his acting touch-paper lit upon seeing an experimental off-Broadway work starring Sergei Polunin.

A year before filming on Call Me By Your Name began in picturesque rural Italy, Guadagnino put in calls again to Hammer and Chalamet to talk through a project he had in mind for them. Chalamet knew of the source material, a mesmerising André Aciman novel which draws in explicit detail the full gamut of obsessive teenage awakenings. The partner of Chalamet’s agent, Brian Swardstrom, had optioned the book. Armie Hammer was previously oblivious to it.

© Giampaolo Sgura

On the eve of its release, Call Me By Your Name feels like Hammer, Chalamet and Luca Guadagnino’s masterpiece. James Ivory adapted the screenplay from Aciman’s startling novel. It is, in some senses a modernisation and coupling of two older Ivory works, Maurice (1987) and A Room With A View (1985). Ivory fashioned both with his late partner Ismail Merchant as part of his golden, immortal and wildly influential run of sophisticated, painterly film-making without which the careers of Hugh Grant, Rupert Everett, Colin Firth and Helena Bonham Carter might have stalled. It is into that richly talented lineage that Hammer and Chalamet now step.

Ivory’s speciality is for the elite, intellectual romance, of which Call Me By Your Name is a particularly sweltering take. It is set in the summer of 1983, lit mostly by a hazy, bronze Mediterranean sunlight and nature’s finest greenery. The immortal Psychedelic Furs song Love My Way is the highlight of a note-perfect soundtrack, mostly orchestrated by Sufjan Stevens. The soft furnishings and food are just so. The wardrobe department has done special work in placing the film in a detailed period without hammering anyone over the head with Eighties references. There is at least one item of clothing, including Chalamet’s Benetton-ish rucksack, that has instant shopping list written over all it for viewers who care about these things.

It is an art-house picture, a small story with potentially huge consequences, taking forensic apparatus to unpick male desire with a new, frank and often breath-taking immersion. There is an auto-erotic scene that Chalamet conducts with a peach that will likely cause future blushes on the fruit and veg aisle of Sainsbury’s for everyone who sees it. The film luxuriates in its sexuality in detail. As Hammer points out, there is no outside obstacle to get in the way of the men exploring themselves and one another, making them film anomalies on whatever Kinsey spectrum of gayness they individually fall. This is not a film about the political restrictions of exterior society; it is about the deep interior life of those free to explore their longing. ‘People have asked me if it’s like Brokeback Mountain,’ says Hammer, ‘and I say, literally not in a single way.’

‘I had a dirt-bike that I would ride around. I had a machete. I know how to cut down a coconut and clean out a papaya. I got the Robinson Crusoe experience, basically.’ - Armie Hammer

Because of the age difference between the two leads, it recalls a little The Reader, the Kate Winslet wartime epic in which her character falls for a teenager. Because of the intimate, carnal exposition of their sexuality, it bears some comparison with Blue is The Warmest Colour, a film which Chalamet loves and Hammer hasn’t seen. Nobody will leave the cinema after watching Call Me By Your Name – a film as candid and expositional on male sexual expression as Moonlight is on its repression – without feeling like they have lived through these men’s deepest emotional faculties. In a question and answer session after its screening at the Berlin Film Festival, one audience member raised his hand in tears, visibly shaken by a testimony delivered to Chalamet’s character by Michael Stuhlbarg, playing his father, toward the sensational close of the film.

‘The week after Luca called,’ continues Chalamet, ‘I went for a meeting with James Ivory. I met him in the lobby of his building and we went to eat together. Then I had a phone call with the two of them two weeks later.’ He was cast as the lead role of Elio, the only child of bohemian academics, a precocious man-child gripped by the mania of obsessive first teenage love when Hammer’s Oliver, a strapping grad-student comes to stay at the family pile one summer. The power play between the two leads turns on a sixpence throughout. Like all first loves – indeed, like a gloriously academic Shirley Valentine – one is never quite sure whether the summer affair between Elio and Oliver is the best or most calamitous thing that could have happened to them.

‘It was really a great leap of faith, I felt,’ says Chalamet of his casting. He hadn’t screen-tested for the role of Elio. ‘I didn’t read for it,’ he adds. ‘And that wasn’t the leap of faith. It was just that they had faith in the work I’d done, in the possibility of it.’ He remembers his first meeting with Luca. ‘At 17 in any context, show business or otherwise, it’s rare to be taken seriously.’

‘People have asked me if it’s like Brokeback Mountain,’ says Hammer, ‘and I say, literally not in a single way’

In May 2016, the two men decamped to Italy for four months to shoot what are, at least for now, the defining roles of their respective careers, free of any discernible inhibition. The characters of Elio and Oliver will stamp them as a high watermark of dramatic excellence far into the future. For Chalamet, who turned up onset for the first day carrying a brown paper McDonalds takeout (‘I’m a chicken nuggets man’), this is his young DiCaprio moment, comparable to Leo’s turn in The Basketball Diaries, that moment when the camera drinks in every detail of a face free to get lost and found in full public view, at its darkest and lightest recesses, ravaged by the unique lunacy of desire.

It positions Chalamet as the only real competition to Lucas Hedges’ generationally definitive role in Manchester By The Sea. Chalamet and Hedges will next star in Greta Gerwig’s directorial debut together, Lady Bird. And after hard sex, hard drugs. Chalamet has just wrapped filming Beautiful Boy, in which he plays the crystal meth-addicted son of Steve Carrell.

For Hammer, Call Me By Your Name is the eventual consolidation of all that starry promise he brought to The Social Network a decade ago. It is the moment his name will begin accruing proper pace and currency of its own. Speaking to the actors, together and alone, it is not only clear that throughout filming this audacious project, a firm friendship has been born but also evident that they have uncovered something about men, bodies and the human mind. By opening up these conversations, Call Me By Your Name has early claims to its own legend.

A conversation with Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet

GQ Style: When did you first read Call Me By Your Name?

Armie Hammer: They sent me a script and I had a really long Skype with Luca, read the book and then had another series of conversations with him, about the movie, about my hesitations with it, him talking to me and helping me understand some things that I didn’t understand before. Once we were truly on the same page I was like, there is no way I am not doing this movie. It scares the daylights out of me, but maybe that’s why I have to do it, you know?

GQS: What were those reservations?

AH: There were a lot of things that I would be doing that I hadn’t done on camera before. Whether it be nudity, whether it be blow-jobs, I’d never really crossed that line in my work before. He talked to me about things that I didn’t understand, whether that be the complexities behind call me by your name and I’ll call you by yours or the peach scene. The book is so textured and layered and the characters are so rich and the locations so beautiful. We went to Bergamo. We were in those places so it really felt real. You just sunk into this thing immediately.

GQS: How well did you know one another by the time you arrived onset?

AH: We’d had three or four weeks in Italy of rehearsals.

Timothée Chalamet: I didn’t know Armie at all before that.

AH: And then we hung out all day, every day.

TC: Being sequestered in Italy, in that dream-world and then having to rely on each other for hanging out off-camera only helps what goes on on-camera.

GQS: What did you bond over first?

AH: The fact that the two of us could communicate with each other. Neither of us spoke fluent Italian. He had a cursory understanding of it and could speak well enough to get by. I picked up a little bit of it while I was there but it was barely more Italian than being able to order my breakfast in the morning. If I wanted to have a conversation beyond ‘hi’, ‘nice morning’, ‘good to see you’, then I had to have it with Timmy. We’d get dropped off at night in the square, look around and say ‘OK, do you want to go over the scenes for tomorrow and have a beer or something?’ We’d end up talking about the day with each other, about the next day, reading over scenes, rehearsing.

GQS: What, if any is the difference between formulating a sexual chemistry onscreen with a man than a woman?

AH: I don’t really feel that there’s much of a difference. Trying to create chemistry with a human is trying to create chemistry with a human. It’s about taking it off-of yourself and reading them and taking what they’re giving you and allowing it to affect you and then having them pick that off-of you. It’s about being so close and intimate with someone that you can detect those subtle changes that allow you to go on this sort of subtle dance.

TC: I almost think the chemistry, as opposed to the physical mechanics of the actual kissing or a sex scene is more palpable in the lack of contact. We had a road-map with André Aciman’s book. I like that Elio at the beginning, as is common in many best friendships, one ends up admiring another person and is a little bit put off by Oliver and his confidence. It doesn’t blossom into a sexual tension or a physical tension, rather a friendship. If there is a physical tension [at first] it’s more a wrestling one.

GQS: How healthy do you think the relationship of Oliver and Elio is?

**TC: **There’s many a lens to look at it through. Through the context of a passionate first love, a summer first love I think it’ll be unique to each viewer who has had that experience. They might look back on it and think, wow, that was one of the most heated, passionate moments I experienced. Or I think many people will walk away from one of those experiences not feeling like it was beneficial to them. They might think, that took something out of me.

**AH: **It’s healthy and not healthy. I’m not a relationship doctor but what I would say is that both of these people were able to acknowledge something inside of themselves and were able to feel something that neither of them had really felt before. It left them both with a better sense of themselves and a better sense of life and love. It was a teaching experience, ultimately, so yes, it might be painful at the time, for both of them. But at the same time, are they better off for having had it? I would say yes. They’re lucky they had a chance at it.

GQS: When was the first time you saw the film?

TC: At Sundance, which Luca had encouraged. I hadn’t been the lead of a film that was premiering at a big festival before. It was surreal, you know? I was 21. I did it when I was 20 and it’s not the most distant film from myself. There are a lot of close-ups. My physical body is present a lot, as is Armie’s. But it was entirely gratifying.

AH: That was the first time I’d seen it in its completed form. I’d seen a rough cut before. It’s always hard for me to watch a movie that I’m in. It breaks the magic of moviemaking. I feel like I totally lost myself in the filming of it. We were there. We had this majestic experience. So watching it would always pale in comparison to getting to film it.

GQS: Do you feel proud of one another’s performances?

AH: I feel so proud of his performance. Timothée is so fucking good in this movie. Having seen him go into this project and then watch him as a person rise to the occasion in such a magnificent way and then turn in a performance that is so stellar, I feel lucky to have gotten to witness the whole process.

TC: Armie and Michael [Stuhlbarg] I’m huge fans of. But I can’t be proud of them because I’m too young to be proud of what they have. It’s not that I’m proud because I expected it. They’re fucking excellent actors.

AH: We both went through something that was so intense and so beautiful and so ethereal. It was such a singular experience that we only really share with each other and we’ll always have that. I think we had that special start at the beginning of a great friendship.

GQS: Have either of you heard Love My Way out of context since making the film?

TC: There was a video that a mutual friend of ours, who’s really Armie’s friend that I became friends with sent us both. He was at a bar when they played it so he sent us it.

AH: All of a sudden I was right back fucking dancing in the street.

GQS: And have you eaten a peach since?

T: I remember eating a peach maybe a week after that scene and thinking, oh, we did a scene with this fruit. I didn’t have it to the degree I do now but just from flicking around online, that’s the scene that’s consistently highlighted itself. It’s funny because now I’m about as aware of that as I could be. When we were shooting that scene, you know, sometimes I really would forget that the camera was there. By the time we did that scene it was almost like an out of body experience.

Armie Hammer’s wife Elizabeth Chambers has been trying to get Luca Guadagnino to show her Call Me By Your Name since the first cuts of it began doing the rounds. ‘Don’t tell her that you’ve seen it twice,’ Hammer instructs, like a good patrician. The couple have two young children, daughter Harper and son Ford. Chambers has a vested interest in the film. Not only is her husband the complicated romantic lead, she’d ran lines with him a lot, helping him prepare in the run up to his leaving the family home to film in Italy last year.

‘She’s such a big part of me getting ready to play a role,’ says Hammer. ‘She’s there with me, running scenes when no-one else is around, talking with me about the work. We do a lot of working together on stuff.’ He says she made a good Elio. ‘She was great. She’s a good everything.’ On his wedding ring finger Hammer has two E’s tattooed in her honour. He hasn’t worried, before today that strangers might think he has an excessive ecstasy habit because of it. ‘Oh hey, man,’ he laughs, ‘it’s not mutually exclusive. By the way, on our six year anniversary I got two, I got four on the fourth, two more on the sixth, I’ll get two more on the eighth and on the tenth it’ll make a circle. I have to take my ring off so much with work, so it’s nice to always have it there.’

Armie Hammer has not had an easy run professionally since The Social Network broke him to mass market. After Fincher hired him, he says the golden seal of approval lasted only so long. ‘I’m 100% positive,’ he notes, ‘that I’ve worked with directors who have hired me just to ask me questions about David Fincher.’

'I’ve worked with directors who have hired me just to ask me questions about David Fincher’

He has worked with some of the greats, including Clint Eastwood and DiCaprio on J. Edgar. ‘I got to play another gay character. I’d never got to do that before and I got to do it in a Clint Eastwood movie with Leonardo DiCaprio. This is amazing, you know?’ He says his parents, who had observed high caution when he first dropped out of High School to become an actor, understood the choice when Eastwood’s name was in the frame. Later he worked with Johnny Depp on The Lone Ranger, directed by Jerry Bruckheimer, Julia Roberts in Mirror Mirror and under Guy Ritchie’s instruction on The Man From UNCLE.

‘The problem with these big movies,’ he says circumspectly, ‘is that they’re met with equally big expectations. Regardless of how good of a film you feel like you made or how much fun you had making it, if you don’t meet the crazy studio metric that they have in place now then your movie’s a failure.’ Hammer is an unlikely but pleasing new indie star. ‘There just felt like something was wrong in that equation to me. I don’t want to do that. So I decided I wanted to make smaller movies that I was passionate about.’ Prior to Call Me By Your Name, his most satisfying film experience was on The Birth of a Nation. In both, he has noticed a significant change in his work. ‘I’m doing this because I love it now, you know?’

A conversation with Armie Hammer:

GQS: You’re obviously an astonishingly good looking fellow. Is it a blessing or blight in terms of your job?

AH: I honestly spend so little time thinking about it.

**GQS: Think about it now. **

AH: OK, are there parts where I would love to go up for them and then you know people will think, oh, he’s a little too clean cut or a little too good looking. That’s a bummer. But at the same time, I’m not going to sit here and go [wipes imaginary tears from eyes], bleugh, bleugh, poor me.

**GQS: We all know what it feels to be a teenage lovefool because we’ve all been one at some point. How does it feel to play Oliver, who is the object of that? **

AH: Well, their dynamic isn’t just one way. Oliver was just as fascinated and just as taken as Elio. That’s why at first he had to keep his distance, because he couldn’t control how he felt about this. So in as much as how Oliver is for Elio, Elio is for Oliver as well. It’s that beautiful dance. It’s a balancing act. You have to do what you need to do for your character. You also have to give that person what they need for their character. And personally – I mean, everyone’s got a different process – but when we were making this movie I could not be self-conscious about anything. I couldn’t even think of what the audience would think about anything because so much of this movie was about being able to lose yourself in that moment, in a sweet, tender way where none of it mattered. So it was about being free and in that moment. The process leading up to it is much more difficult than the actual filming of it, which is true with a lot of things.

GQS: Are you a nervous actor?

AH: Oh, totally.

**GQS: Yet you’re such an astonishingly self-confident man. **

AH: No, I’m a nervous wreck that is able to cover that most of the time. It’s my superpower. I was terrified before we were going to do it. I wouldn’t say it out loud. I wouldn’t say it in front of Timmy, certainly. I wouldn’t admit it to Luca. But I was nervous. This was a new experience. Having to free yourself so completely while being naked with a man in front of a room full of people, when you think about the prospect of that, it sounds really difficult. But when you’re there doing it, it’s incredibly easy. So the build-up was a lot more intense than the actual filming.

GQS: I guess that fear complements the performance a little, because it’s implicitly part of any consummation process.

AH: Right? They’re discovering this for the first time too.

GQS: What’s making Call Me By Your Name taught you about masculinity?

AH: I never think about masculinity and I don’t think these people think about that, either. For the first time you see a movie with two men, who feel something for each other and decide to go and discover this new place in a sweet, tender way, and there is no wife at home, no conflict, no-one getting sick. That doesn’t happen. You just see two men be sweet and tender with each other. Which catches people off-guard. Can we talk about Michael Stuhlbarg’s speech at the end? Like, I am going to remember that and say that to my children every day. May we all have been blessed with parents that would say that. Parents, say this to your kids. My god, it’s amazing.

GQS: I guess then the question is not what it’s taught you about masculinity but what a film about gay love has taught you about fatherhood? ** ** AH: Dude, totally. By the way, every gay man, every straight man, every girl, every girl who wants to be a princess, every girl who wants to be a prince, if every parent had the capacity to articulate that to their children, what kind of a world would we be living in?

Timothée Chalamet has circumnavigated the outer edges of stardom since his frequently scene-stealing turn in Homeland. He has been shot for print by Hedi Slimane, appeared in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar and for a brief period earned some unexpected Mail Online kudos as the first boyfriend of Madonna’s eldest child, Lourdes. He is as captivating a figure in person as Elio is on film.

At the Berlin Film Festival, after the screening of Call Me By Your Name Chalamet told André Aciman that his was the most important opinion on the film. ‘I can only hope that we did it a shred of justice,’ he told him. He is blessed with a certain pleasing, joyful intensity. Chalamet enjoys finding some proximity to the roles he is playing. For Elio, he drew on his half French ancestry. ‘I know small town European life,’ he says. As a child, his family would holiday in France. ‘I didn’t have the anxiety of, ooh, where I creep in this is going to be bad.’ He says the long periods of research he puts in to a role are insurance policies against any future mistakes he might make.

Chalamet’s sister attended the prestigious American School of Ballet. He went to La Guardia, the public performing arts school. ‘To be in that environment at that age?’ he says, ‘You know, college are the formative years for a lot of people but to have that experience from 13 through 17, for better or for worse, to have someone in your ear going “feel, feel, feel, stop inhibiting, feel, feel, feel,” it’s helped me a lot as an actor.’

Accessing all this pure emotion at such a formative age cannot help but have schooled him for Call Me By Your Name. ‘It’s the opposite of emoting, you know? Emoting is just another word for bad acting.’ In the exhaustive press run-up to the release of the film, Timothée saw himself described as ‘former child actor’, which confused him. ‘I’ve never seen myself, ever as a child actor, even though I had done some work. That’s almost an anomaly of living in New York. It made me laugh.’ La Guardia was fundamental to his development. ‘That’s where I got to take it seriously. I cannot plug that school enough.’

‘I’ve never seen myself, ever as a child actor, even though I had done some work. That’s almost an anomaly of living in New York. It made me laugh’

Without specifying which ones, he says that he had been up for a relentless round of big, billboard projects before Call Me By Your Name came along, parts he got perilously to scoring. By an interesting twist of circumstance, he has missed the phase Armie Hammer went through, of carrying vehicles with big commercial expectation. After Call Me By Your Name, in which he turns in one of the great young actor’s performances of his age, he is free to do whatever it is he pleases. He will always have that one.

A conversation with Timothée Chalamet:

GQS: How much of you as an actor is down to growing up in New York?

TC: It’s led to ambiguity personally. I wouldn’t be acting without this melting pot, not so much even of people but I think of it as a melting pot of emotion and experience. You go on the subway and it’s all there, which lends itself to a lot of creativity. It’s ambiguous by nature. It’s free forming. I struggle with that a little personally but creatively being from New York and having been exposed to all these things and people from a young age is great.

GQS: I was going to ask earlier if you thought the reason you didn’t get the big commercial roles was because you didn’t have quite the right face for it, now I want to know if it’s because you didn’t have the right mind?

TC: No, because those were only things by happenstance. That’s been the toughest lesson to learn from auditioning these last six, seven years, that when you don’t get a role it’s not because you didn’t hit that beat perfectly or you didn’t get that idea to the extent that you would’ve liked. It’s actually that somebody else did something different. Better or worse, it’s just part of that vocabulary. It’s the powerlessness.

GQS: Is there a macrocosmic importance to the Call Me By Your Name outside of the small love story of Oliver and Elio?**

GQS: It’s always so difficult for me to answer questions like this because I think it is what it is to whoever watches it. That’s going to be true of any piece of art.

GQS: Your performance is so physically fearless in it. Was that a natural place for you to go?

TC: I was in the greatest hands. I have to say that first. That’s a given. I just did another film where one of the first things they did was not clothed and I was reminded that I did have a certain anxiety about that, but just getting to Italy in advance and Luca made me feel as if I wasn’t even aware of the camera. We’d do three, four takes, we didn’t have that many and I was so lucky with Luca because he oozes experience which oozes calmness. I’m a nervous young actor. Luca would come over and say ‘try something else.’ I’d go ‘OK’. In so many scenes, especially intimate ones, the shot he uses is the last take. That gives you such a feeling of lightness, as if you’re levitating or something. To be shooting in Italy for four months, where your artistic opinion is taken as somewhat worthy is a far stretch from walking into a casting office on 34th Street. His calmness, his experience, his wanting to do this picture and this story justice, I owe Luca the biggest hug in the world.

GQS: Is 21 too young to win an Oscar?

That is so outside… Look, I went for a huge film two years ago that I didn’t get and I was devastated for about six months. I’m not being hyperbolic. So I’m pinching myself now, that aside from academic evaluations of the film, having seen people viscerally react to it at Sundance and Berlin, whether because they’re reminded of an experience or they wish they’d had that experience, what it’s already been has been more than I could’ve ever asked for.

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