A Complicated Affair

Armie Hammer was poised to be a major matinee idol. But he wasn’t prepared for what happened to him on the set of Call Me by Your Name.

- Kyle Buchanan

ARMIE HAMMER is six-foot-five, a general advantage in life but one that doesn’t serve him well on the dance floor. “When I dance,” he told me recently over lunch in West Hollywood, “I think, You’re really shit at this, and everyone around you knows it because you’re the tallest guy on the dance floor and you stick out like a sore thumb.”

You can imagine Hammer’s embarrassment, then, when he had to shoot a dance scene for his new movie, the 1980s-set gay romance Call Me by Your Name. It’s a pivotal moment in the film that comes not long after his character, grad student Oliver, has arrived in a small Italian village to assist the professor father of our protagonist, 17-year old Elio (Timothée Chalamet). The secret crush on this interloper that Elio nurses becomes full blown the night he watches Oliver boogie down to “Love My Way,” by the Psychedelic Furs: Oliver’s ecstatic, unabashed, and utterly indifferent to the world around him. “And that’s so not me, in any situation,” said Hammer. “I was like, ‘This is hell. Can we switch this for more nude scenes, please?’ ”

It wasn’t easy, but Hammer finally shed his inhibitions. His moves are just the slightest bit dorky, yet his character’s confidence is irresistible. Just don’t expect Hammer to echo Oliver’s carefree attitude: Ever since a clip of the scene went viral in October, the actor has gone dark on social media. “Anytime I would open up my Twitter, it was just a ton of that,” Hammer said with a laugh, referring to the clip, “and I was like, ‘Nope, I can’t have my nose rubbed in this anymore. I’m out!’ ”