Call Me By Your Name director Luca Guadagnino has opened up about Armie Hammer’s cannibal allegations.
Over the last few weeks, the 51-year-old talent has been busy promoting his new film Bones and All – which stars Timothée Chalamet and Taylor Russell.
Based on Camille DeAngelis’ critically-acclaimed horror novel of the same name, the film follows teenage cannibal Maren (Russell) as she embarks on a cross-country road trip across the US to find her father. Along the way, she meets fellow drifter Lee (Chalamet), who ends up joining Maren on her journey.
While fans are excited to see Chalamet and Guadagnino team up again, some have pointed out the eerie similarities between the film and Hammer’s real-life cannibal allegations.
In an interview with Deadline, Guadagnino opened up about the ongoing controversy and said that the timing was purely coincidental.
“It didn’t dawn on me. I realised this afterwards when I started to be told of some of these innuendos on social media,” he told the news outlet.
“This project—which was a popular book—had been in development for a number of years before Dave Kajganich brought it to me in 2020. I responded immediately to these characters who are disenfranchised and living on the edge of society.
“Any link with anything else exists only in the realm of social media, with which I do not engage. The relationship between this kind of digital muckraking and our wish to make this movie is non-existent and it should be met with a shrug.”
Guadagnino’s statement comes a year after multiple women accused Hammer of sexual abuse.
Back in January 2021, an anonymous Instagram account released screenshots of messages that Hammer had allegedly sent to women he’d had affairs with between 2016 and 2020.
In the various conversations, the 35-year-old actor is shown describing his sexual fantasies, including violence, rape and cannibalism.
A woman Hammer dated for four months in 2020, 23-year-old model Paige Lorenze, claimed he branded her by carving his initial “A” into her pelvis. She also claimed he was “serious” in his suggestion that she should remove a lower rib, surgically, just so he could eat it.
Speaking with the Daily Mail, Lorenze said: “He really thought that his fantasies were normal behaviour in the BDSM, non-normative, sexual kink community. I thought that this is what it was. I thought I was safe.”
Hammer has since denied all wrongdoing and has maintained that all of his relationships were consensual.
However following the allegations, the actor dropped out of numerous projects – including the Jennifer Lopez-led rom-com Shotgun Wedding, the Paramount+ drama series The Offer, Starz series Gaslit and the Broadway play The Minutes.
Check out the trailer for Bones and All here or below.
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