@OCClient I am planning on seeing it when it opens in LA. I don't work on the 24th! Apart from checking out any sale on a new dishwasher, I am free. What about you?
In the meantime, below is another article on that tall drink of water, Armie Hammer...
The words tumble out of Armie Hammer’s mouth so fast that sometimes they hit their mark before you realize what he’s even said. That attribute made Hammer perfect to play Oliver, the grad student who beguiles young Elio (Timothée Chalamet) in Luca Guadagnino’s Italian romance Call Me by Your Name, since his character often ducks out of every scene with a tossed-off “Later,” and leaves Elio behind to parse everything said and unsaid between them. It also means that Hammer simply packs more words into every minute than anyone I’ve ever interviewed, and he told me plenty of great stories I just didn’t have room for in this week’s profile. Here, then, are 15 more of them.
1. He made a crazy election bet with Luca Guadagnino.
Yes, we’re all familiar with the time that Armie Hammer expertly ethered James Woods on Twitter, but for my money, Hammer’s most cutting clapback came last November. Shortly after Donald Trump’s election victory, a frustrated Hammer tweeted, “Our new president elect is the man the KKK endorsed. I’m going to bed.” The next morning, a random twitter user by the name of “bobokoko2” replied, “He didn’t seek their endorsement, nor did he embrace it. Quit changing the narrative to fit your political view.” Mere minutes later, Hammer wrote back, “What part of the narrative did I change? They did endorse him. Adjust your hood so you can see better.”
Adjust. Your hood. So you can see better.
With that terse tweet in mind, I had to ask Hammer what he was going through on Election Night. “I was officially depressed,” he said. “It was as depressing as anything I’d ever seen, and I’ve been more depressed since.” Making matters worse was that he had made a “way too big” bet with hisCall Me by Your Name director about the election’s outcome, and he found himself on the losing end: “That was rough. My whole reasoning for taking the bet with Luca was, ‘We’re not at that place as a country. I know we’ve got our problems, but it’s not possible that we’re that bad.’ And boy, have I been proven wrong!”
So what were the terms of the bet that Guadagnino and Hammer had made? If Hillary Clinton won, as Hammer had been certain she would, then Guadagnino would have to fly Hammer to the city of his choosing, put him up at a beautiful hotel for a few days, and join him for dinner in that city’s best restaurant. When Trump won, as the more fatalistic Guadagnino had predicted, Hammer found himself unable to finance that same prize for his director. “I was like, ‘Let me be honest with you, I cannot afford to do this bet right now. I just can’t! I’ve only done small movies for the last few years. It would literally bankrupt me, and I need to buy diapers tomorrow.’” Hammer has since bartered Guadagnino down to a Hermès sommelier set, which still costs a pretty penny: “I have now learned why they say, ‘Don’t make bets with Sicilians.’”
2. There’s one topic Hammer has never broached with his director.
Hammer and Guadagnino told me about their intense bond while filming Call Me by Your Name, which Hammer described as “falling in love.” What was it about Guadagnino that he so responded to? “In all honesty, I’ve never met a more astute student of human emotion,” said Hammer. “The complexity and duality within every human, he just gets it. He’s just a fucking genius, I don’t know.”
I’ve had conversations before with Guadagnino where he discusses actors, and it’s uncanny how well he can zero in on the locus of a star’s appeal, laying bare what makes that actor tick. It’s more than just a party trick: Guadagnino is simply that good at reading people. I wondered, then, if he had ever analyzed Hammer to his face. “I think he knows that if he would describe me to me, it would crush me,” Hammer said with a laugh. “He’s never even tried, and I’m so appreciative.”
3. Hammer didn’t meet Timothée Chalamet until they were both cast.
Though Call Me by Your Name lives or dies based on the connection Hammer has with his co-star, incredibly, he never did a chemistry read with Chalamet. In fact, the two actors only met once they were both in Italy to begin work on the film. “That might just be part of Luca’s genius,” said Hammer. “He said he just picked people who he loved, and knew that would be enough. As a control freak myself, that would scare the shit out of me.”
Fortunately, Hammer and Chalamet got along like gangbusters. “Timmy is, without a doubt, the most emotionally accessible human being I have ever come across in my life,” said Hammer. “You say something to him and you watch the entire thought process play out on his face. He is a completely open book, which is why you can end the movie on a seven-minute shot of just his face. I couldn’t do that!” Though Chalamet is just 21, Hammer said he more than held his own in their scenes. “I was as impressed with Timmy as a scene partner as I was with anyone I’ve ever done a scene with,” he said. “I know he’s going to be able to maintain that and foster that, and I can’t wait to see what he does as a performer.”
4. Hammer needed a creative muse for that dance scene.
As he made clear in our profile, Hammer wasn’t keen on filming Call Me by Your Name’s glorious dance scene. “Like any actor or artist, I definitely have my moments of feeling self-conscious,” said Hammer, who self-describes as “so gangly.” The fact that the scene was filmed without music — the Psychedelic Furs song “Love My Way” was added later, in postproduction — only exacerbated his embarrassment.
If Chalamet hadn’t been nearby, Hammer isn’t sure he could have shed his inhibitions. “He had to basically console me to help me get through the whole night,” said Hammer. “He’s so fucking free and open! When it was my coverage and he wasn’t even on shot, he would just be dancing over someone else, enjoying himself, having a good time. Watching him be so free every time, I was like, ‘Okay, that’s what this needs to be for me. This moment has to be a demonstration of Oliver really in his body, not worrying about anything and just letting himself go.’”
5. He’s game for a Call Me by Your Name sequel.
Since Hammer speaks so passionately about his experience shooting Call Me by Your Name, I asked him how he would feel if Guadagnino reunited the actors for a follow-up film, as the director has expressed interest in doing. “Anything he wants to do, I’m in,” said Hammer. “If it’s a sequel to this, that’s hilarious. I don’t know how you’d do it.” Hammer tossed out a few ideas for what could happen in the second film, mulling over whether they could expand the epilogue from André Aciman’s book that’s not used in the movie. Then he shook his head and pointed at a fruit plate on the table: “Whatever it’s about — it could even be a movie about this plate covered in limes — as long as it’s Luca, I would still love to do it.”
6. His great-grandfather may have been a Russian spy.
Hammer plays a Jewish character in Call Me by Your Name who wears his Star of David proudly. In real life, his father’s side of the family hails from Russian Jews, but to borrow a phrase from the film, they were “Jews of discretion” who didn’t advertise their affiliation. “It was always a big deal in my family that we were Russian, more so than anything else,” said Hammer, who has his last name inked in Russian on his wrist. “My great grandfather Armand was Jewish, but he didn’t even get his bar mitzvah. He was gonna be bar mitzvahed, and then he died the month before. That’s case in point of how it all kinda went.”
The great-grandfather Hammer is talking about, a globe-trotting oil tycoon who ran Occidental Petroleum Corporation until his death in 1990, was labeled by some biographers as a spy for Russia. I asked Hammer what he’d heard about the matter. “He was as much a Russian spy as he was an American spy,” he said. “He was the kind of person who went all over the world and had connections with all kinds of people, so it would be hard to imagine that when he got back to either America or Russia that someone didn’t come up to him and say, ‘Hey, can I ask you questions about what you saw?’ And I bet he was like, ‘Sure, if I can get this from you.’ He was a deal-maker.”
Continue here for #'s 7- 15
