Luca Guadagnino is throwing cold water on the idea of a sequel to his Oscar-winning 2017 film Call Me by Your Name. On the set of his first-ever US-set movie, Bone and All, the director suggested he’d moved on from the project.
“The truth of the matter is, my heart is still there,” he told Deadline, “but I’m working on this movie now, and I’m hopefully going to do Scarface soon, and I have many projects and so will focus on this side of the Atlantic and the movies I want to make.”
This is the first time Guadagnino has spoken about the proposed follow-up since star Armie Hammer’s very public fall from grace. The actor has been accused of emotional abuse and rape by multiple women, and has since been dropped from a number of film projects.
Previously, a Call Me by Your Name sequel seemed likely. After the film’s release, Guadagnino spoke of it as the first part of a longer story, comparing possible future installments to Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise series. André Aciman’s 2007 novel on which the film was based features several glimpses of Elio and Oliver (played by Timothée Chalamet and Hammer in the film) in the decades after their summer affair, and Guadagnino has spoken a lot over the last few years about the themes he might want to explore if their story were to continue. He and Aciman had been reportedly working on a script together, and both Chalamet and Hammer had expressed an interest in returning to their roles.
In 2019, Aciman published Find Me, a sequel to the novel, which was met with tepid reviews. The bulk of that novel was devoted to an affair Elio’s father has with a significantly younger woman, which revived some of the discomfort inherent in the age difference between Elio and Oliver. In the original, Hammer’s Oliver is a 24-year-old grad student who begins a sexual relationship with 17-year-old Elio. With the actor’s own abusive behavior hanging over the film, maybe the only “Call Me by Your Name” follow-up we need at this point is whatever Lil Nas X does next.
