Bones and All director: "If Timothée does the movie, I do the movie"
Call Me By Your Name director Luca Guadagnino has reunited with Chalamet for the new film.
Timothée Chalamet has reunited with Call Me By Your Name director Luca Guadagnino for new film Bones and All, and the Italian filmmaker has revealed that the Oscar-nominated actor was the only person he ever thought of for the role.
Chalamet plays Lee in the film, a disenfranchised drifter who finds himself falling in love with Taylor Russell's Maren – with the pair bonding over their rather unusual shared affliction: an insatiable appetite for human flesh.
And speaking exclusively to RadioTimes.com, Guadagnino revealed that his mind instantly went to the Dune star when he first read the script.
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"I read the script and I said, 'That's the role for Timothée,'" he said. "Actually, I said to the writer [David Kajganich]: 'If Timothée does the movie, I do the movie.'"
Of course, since their last collaboration five years ago, Chalamet has shot to global stardom - but Guadagnino revealed that nothing much had changed when it came to working with the actor this time around.
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"Timothée was so... he's an experimentalist," he explained. "He likes to experiment and he was so like, how can I say... articulate and deep in his approach – then as much as he is now."
While working with Chalamet was a reunion for the director, this was the first time Taylor Russell had starred in one of his films, and Guadagnino explained that he had been interested in casting her ever since watching her work in the 2019 film Waves.
He met with her via Zoom to discuss the role and was blown away by "this vibrant young girl, who was clearly articulate and intelligent in a beautiful way" – instantly deciding that she was right for the part of Maren.
The film also stars Mark Rylance as Sully, a fellow cannibal who lives a rather tragic, lonely existence, and Guadagnino described the Acadamy Award winner as "a beautiful artist".
"[He is] a great man who comes with a beautiful intensity to him that is inspiring, and I cannot wait to go back to work with him," he said.
"He is tragic, the character. He's looking for someone who ends the solitude and sense of abandonment, but he cannot register that the other who he wants doesn't want him."
Meanwhile, Chalamet is not the only Call Me By Your Name star to make an appearance in the film – Michael Stuhlbarg pops up for a brief but unforgettable cameo role, and Guadagnino said that the actor did a lot of preparation even for such a short appearance.
"Mike and I, we know each other very well," he said. "And the script was great, the scene was great. And then in the weeks prior to the shoot, he gave me and David like 100 questions to answer about the character – specific questions like what does he eat when he doesn't eat people? What is his background? Where does he come from?
"A lot of these questions, he was really working on getting as many details as possible to kind of needle the threads all together in order to make a beautiful tapestry out of that great moment on screen."
Bones and All is released in UK cinemas on 23rd November 2022. Check out our TV Guide or Streaming Guide, or visit our Film hub for more news and features.
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