Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer’s romantic drama “Call Me By Your Name” would have looked very different if Shia LaBeouf had been cast in the lead.
The former Disney Channel star, 35, was in the running to play Hammer’s character, Oliver, who was the older boyfriend of Chalamet’s Elio.
The 2017 film’s Oscar-winning writer and producer James Ivory explained in his new memoir, “Solid Ivory,” that LaBeouf was first contacted to play the role.
In passages published in GQ Wednesday, Ivory wrote that he was uncertain about LaBeouf’s casting due to the fact that he couldn’t 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.”
Ivory claimed that LaBeouf was later “dropped” from the movie following some bad press. LaBeouf was arrested in 2017 for public intoxication and disorderly conduct in Georgia and has also been accused of abuse by several women including FKA Twigs and singer-songwriter Sia.
“He’d fought with his girlfriend; he’d fended off the police somewhere when they had tried to calm him down,” Ivory continued. “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.”
The filmmaker then revealed that he was let go as director — and the feature would instead be directed solo by Guadagnino.
“The last time I saw Luca was before [filming] began, in New York, when I still believed I was co-directing with him; we joked about what might happen if we got into an argument on set, and laughed about it,” he wrote. “I made plans to go to Crema after the Cannes Film Festival in May, where the restored ‘Howards End’ was to be shown. And then I was dropped.”
He continued, “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.”
“Solid Ivory” will be released on Nov. 2.