Was Shia LaBeouf fired from 'Call Me By Your Name'? Role went to Armie Hammer
Shia LaBeouf, 35, was first contacted to play one of the lead roles in romantic drama 'Call Me By Your Name'. Had he been finally selected, we would see Timothée Chalamet with LaBeouf, and not with Armie Hammer. In his new memoir named 'Solid Ivory', the 2017 film’s Oscar-winning writer and producer James Ivory opened up on how LaBeouf was first contacted for the role of Oliver, which was finally played by Armie Hammer, while Timothée Chalamet played the role of Elio Perlman.
In passages that have been published in GQ, Ivory said that he was not certain about casting LaBeouf because it was difficult to visualize the “Fury” actor playing “an academic writing about the Greek philosopher Heraclitus.” “Shia came to read for us in New York with Timothée Chalamet, paying for his own plane ticket, and [director Luca Guadagnino] and I had been blown away,” Ivory said. “The reading by the two young actors had been sensational; they made a very convincing hot couple. But then, too, Shia was dropped. He had had some bad publicity. He’d fought with his girlfriend; he’d fended off the police somewhere when they had tried to calm him down. And Luca would not call him, or his agent. I emailed Shia to offer reassurance, but then Luca cast Armie Hammer and never spoke to, or of, Shia again."
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Ivory said that he was then let go as a director, and the feature film instead went on be directed solo by Guadagnino. "The last time I saw Luca was before it began, in New York, when I still believed I was codirecting with him; we joked about what might happen if we got into an argument on set, and laughed about it. I made plans to go to Crema after the Cannes Film Festival in May, where the restored Howards End was to be shown," Ivory said. "And then I was dropped. I was never told why I had been dropped, by Luca or anybody else: it was presented in an “it has been decided that…” sort of way. Luca would be the sole director. I didn’t care all that much. I could see that it might be very awkward sometimes to have two directors on the set."
"What upset me most over the breakup of my collaboration with Luca was that it destroyed the life—stretching over a couple of years—that I had hoped to have again in Italy, a country I love and can never have enough of. Something like my life thirty years before, when I made 'A Room with a View'," he added.
Armie Hammer, best known for playing the Winklevoss twins in the 2010 film ‘Social Network’, created quite a stir on social media owing to some of his alleged DMs, extensively talking about sex and cannibalism, among other shocking and rather strange interests. A considerable number of social media users shared screengrabs from their own chats which showed messages received from an account that appears to have Hammer’s name on the handle. The speculations about the actor having alleged fetishes left many appalled.