‘Call Me By Your Name’ Director Luca Guadagnino Defends Casting Straight Actors
‘Call Me By Your Name’ director Luca Guadagnino has defended his decision to cast straight actors on the film’s gay leads.
While in an interview promoting his new Salvadore Ferragamo biopic, ‘Shoemaker of Dreams’, the director brushed off criticisms for casting Timothée Chalamet as the 17-year-old Elio and Armie Hammer as his older lover Oliver in his adaptation of André Aciman's queer coming-of-age novel.
“I read too much Freud to be taking seriously this kind of critics,” he said. “Meaning that I honestly don’t believe I have the right to decide whether an actor is straight or not. Who am I to know what somebody is thinking of himself or herself within themselves. Yes, Armie is a straight man with a wife and children and the same can be said of Timothée. But do I ask them to swear on their sexuality, on their identities, on their desires, before I cast them? I don’t!”
“If I have to cast what people think is the real thing for a role, I wouldn’t be able to cast. I cannot cast a gay man to play Oliver. I have to cast Oliver to play Oliver because the identities of gay men are as multiple as the flowers in the realm of earth,” he said. “So there is not a gay identity. One person who is gay is completely different to another person who is gay.
“So, if I have to be accurate to this kind of dull remark, I could cast Oliver but Oliver doesn’t exist. He’s a creature of [writer] André Aciman. We go back to the last point I want to make which is that the beauty of acting is the possibility of the creation and embodiment of new selves through the art of acting.”
According to the ‘Advocate’, Guadagnino compared calls for the authentic casting of gay roles to requiring an actual serial killer to portray Dr. Hannibal Lecter in ‘The Silence of the Lambs’.
“Does Mr. Hopkins need to be a serial killer himself to play that role?” asked Guadagnino, referring to Anthony Hopkins.
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