One day after the announcement of “House of Hammer,” a Discovery+ documentary detailing the cannibalism sex-fantasy accusations against Armie Hammer, “Call Me by Your Name” director Luca Guadagnino released the trailer for his next movie “Bones and All,” a cannibal love story starring Hammer’s former co-star Timothée Chalamet.
While many on Twitter were quick to connect the theme of Guadagnino’s upcoming movie with the allegations against Hammer, the director insists it’s only coincidental.
“It didn’t dawn on me,” Guadagnino said in an interview with Deadline ahead of the Venice Film Festival. “I realized this afterward when I started to be told of some of these innuendos on social media.”
He continued, “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. I would prefer to talk about what the film has to say, rather than things that have nothing to do with it.”
Guadagnino said that “Bones and All,” which is based on Camille DeAngelis’ 2015 book of the same name, has been in development for “a number of years.”
Waving off any link between Hammer and his next film, the director concluded: “The muckraking of social media doesn’t address anything constructively, and the idea that this very profoundly important fight for equality can be misdirected in this way is something that frustrates me greatly.”
Premiering at the Venice Film Festival, “Bones and All” reunites Guadagnino with Chalamet. Taylor Russell, Michael Stuhlbarg, André Holland, Chloë Sevigny, David Gordon-Green, Jessica Harper, Jake Horowitz and Mark Rylance also star.
Three-part series “House of Hammer” investigates accusations against the actor — which he has emphatically and repeatedly denied through lawyers — including messages that he allegedly sent to women about his cannibalistic fantasies and sexual fetishes, which his accusers say were abusive. The trailer for the docuseries features two of Hammer’s alleged victims giving on-camera interviews and sharing screenshots of messages and audio of voice memos they claim to have received from the actor.