Timothee Chalamet has offered a response of sorts to the sexual assault allegations against his Call Me By Your Name costar, Armie Hammer. But it doesn’t help answer the question of whether anyone would really benefit from his take on the topic in the first place.
In a new profile for Time, Chalamet reportedly “demurred” when Hammer was brought up. He said, “I totally get why you’re asking that, but it’s a question worthy of a larger conversation, and I don’t want to give you a partial response.”
It’s not really a surprise that Chalamet was asked to comment: While the 25-year-old actor may have entered the public’s consciousness with his minor role in 2017's Lady Bird, it was Call Me By Your Name that catapulted him to stardom (and earned him an Academy Award nomination). In it, Hammer played Chalamet’s older and reluctant love interest, and perhaps it was the intimacy of their roles that tainted the film when, earlier this year, a slew of young women came out with horrific abuse accusations against Hammer. This included a rape allegation from a 24-year-old woman named Effie who accused Hammer of raping her for hours in 2017. Hammer and his team responded by denying the allegation, calling Effie an “attention-seeking” woman (very original!) with “kinky sexual desires.” Whether Hammer will become some kind of Hollywood pariah has yet to be seen, but suffice to say, Chalamet’s profile is rising while Hammer’s is in limbo.
So, again, it’s no surprise that, while doing press for his upcoming movie Dune, Chalamet was asked about the allegations against his former co-star. He’ll almost certainly be asked about it again when press for The French Dispatch continues through the fall and into the next year. But this post-2016, post-Me Too phenomenon of asking celebrities about everything from rape to mental health to police brutality, as if the public will glean anything from it beyond a canned PR response or, on occasion, a real foot-in-mouth situation, feels increasingly pointless. It reads more like an attempt to get a gotcha quote from a celebrity, or an exercise in who has the PR team with the most up-to-date social justice buzzwords to dole out.
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