Armie Hammer’s role in ‘Call Me By Your Name’: an honor, a challenge

After appearing in “The Man From U.N.C.L.E” and “The Lone Ranger,” two big-budget, special-effects-heavy action films, Armie Hammer was ready for a change.

Enter Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnino with an offer for the actor to star in the gay love story “Call Me By Your Name,” which charts a romance in early 1980s Italy between seventeen year-old Elio (Timothee Chalamet) and the 24-year-old Oliver (Hammer), a research assistant.

Hammer didn’t have to think twice about joining the project, which has received rave reviews during its run on the festival circuit and is considered a shoo-in for a Best Picture Oscar nomination.

“I was honored to be asked to do this,” says Hammer, 31, who’ll next play Martin Ginsburg, husband of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in a biopic of the Supreme Court justice starring Felicity Jones.

“It seemed like an amazing challenge as an actor. I’m not talking about playing a character who was gay. I’ve done that before. That wasn’t any sort of hurdle that I had to personally overcome.

“The challenge that I [understood] in this movie was that it lived and died on the connection of these two characters. There was no distractions, no green screen, no special effects, no monsters. There was nothing to distract you at all. The only thing that propels the movie are the emotional moments between the characters.

“So, if those didn’t ring true, then the movie would not work. It just seemed like a challenge for me as an actor to make myself that emotionally accessible and vulnerable.”

For Hammer, one of the movie’s biggest lures was the way it takes its sweet time exploring the developing feelings between the two men.

“There’s one great example that [I cite to prove] that this movie just lets everything live, and it doesn’t rush anything along,” says Hammer. “It’s the scene where we’re riding bikes and we ride past the camera down this road, and we just keep riding, and we keep riding, and we keep riding, and you watch these two people who are really enjoying each other and the summer enjoy it as they just disappear into it.

“If the film was made by a studio or if it was an American production, I think our sense of ADD would kick in and we’d be like, “All right, let them go for five seconds and now let’s go to the next scene.”

“Luca says that everyone is a slave to enjoyment, so no one understands desire. But this movie really just takes its time…in a way where it feels like you live a summer almost in real time.”

Based on a novel by Andre Aciman, “Call Me By Your Name” is very purposely set in the early 1980s before AIDs changed the dating landscape for both homosexual and heterosexual singles.

“I think that 1983 is the beginning of the end,” notes Guadagnino. “The end of what? I would say of the end of the power to the people that sprung out of ‘68 and died with Reagan. If there is [a time] in which a boy like Elio can be and his parents can be, it’s exactly there, right then.

“I like the idea that we are witnessing the end of what was the complexity and the explosiveness of that kind of cultural world scenario…Then came the triumph of Thatcher and Reagan [which was] the conservative backlash.”

Hammer believes that even though the movie chronicles the attraction between two men, it strikes universal chords of love and affection.

“What happens in the movie…is a wonderful progression of watching two human beings become more and more enthralled with each other, and finally feeling comfortable enough to open themselves up completely,” says Hammer who is married to former E News correspondent Elizabeth Chambers with whom he has two children, daughter Harper, 3, and 10-month-old son Ford.

“I think that that’s why this movie connects with so many people, because regardless of your orientation or identification, you’ve felt those feelings before, of being totally incapacitated by this feeling of want and desire for another person, and then having that come to fruition and then maybe having it go away.

“Those are basic human emotions that everybody’s dealt with, and I think that’s why so many people are connecting with the movie.”