'Call Me By Your Name' Sequel: Luca Guadagnino Wants Dakota Johnson On Board
Could we be witnessing the rise of another iconic director/actor pairing in real time? Director Luca Guadagnino has worked with actress Dakota Johnson twice already with A Bigger Splash and this year's Suspiria, and now the filmmaker wants Johnson to co-star in his planned sequel to the 2017 indie Call Me By Your Name.
Find out who Johnson would play in the Call Me By Your Name sequel below, and learn how CMBYN star Armie Hammer reacted to the news.
Scorsese and De Niro. Carpenter and Russell. Hitchcock and Stewart. Wright and Pegg. Will "Guadagnino and Johnson" eventually be added to that list?
The news about Guadagnino wanting Johnson to appear in Call Me By Your Name 2 comes from a New Yorker profile on the Italian director (via IndieWire), in which the interviewer was present for a conversation between Guadagnino and actor Armie Hammer, who played CMBYN's Oliver, an American exchange student who gets swept up in a deeply passionate summer romance with Timothee Chalamet's Elio. The director revealed that he wanted Johnson to play Oliver's wife in the sequel.
"She has to be a New England kind of hoochie woman," [Guadagnino] said, riffing merrily. "You have, maybe, five children."
"Oh, great," Hammer said.
"The only problem is the title," Guadagnino reflected. "It cannot be Call Me by Your Name Two."
That's the extent of the profile's info about the sequel, but it's a nice tease for a project that many, including Chalamet and Hammer, hope comes to fruition. Both actors have previously expressed interest in returning to reprise their roles for a story that takes place years after the original movie – Chalamet recently referred to the sequel's planned time jump as "the Boyhood style of storytelling."
Like Kristen Stewart before her, Johnson has already proven that she's not willing to be defined by the romance franchise that took her career to another level. Here's hoping that she actually has some interesting layers to play in this story, assuming everything goes according to plan.
Earlier this year, Guadagnino revealed that he was already hard at work coming up with the story:
"I'm already conceiving the story with [Call Me By Your Name author] André Aciman, and it's gonna happen five or six years afterwards, so almost in 1990. It's gonna be a new movie, a different tone. You'll see a lot of the East Coast of America – they're going to go around the world."
And if you're already swooning over the idea of seeing Oliver and Elio reunite, get pumped, because Guadagnino might not stop at just one sequel: he could turn this into an ongoing film franchise:
"These characters are so fantastic, and I want to know what happens to them. The last 40 pages of the book tell you about 20 years in the life of Oliver and Elio. So I started to think about Michael Apted's Up, and the cycle of films [Francois] Truffaut devoted to the character of Antoine Doinel. And I thought, maybe it's not a question of sequel, it's a question of chronicling everyone in this film. I think seeing these characters growing in the bodies of these actors will be quite fantastic."
There's no indication yet of when production on this movie will begin, but the filmmaker previously hinted that it might be ready as soon as 2020, which would align Chalamet's real-life age with the age Elio is supposed to be in the sequel.