Call Me by Your…..Sequel???

Have you ever watched a two-hour art film that’s as much about meditative afternoons in the Italian countryside as it is about gay romance and thought, Hmmmmmmmm, you know what this could really use is a splashy sequel? Then you’re in luck. After months of speculation, actor Michael Stuhlbarg has confirmed…the speculation. Call Me by Your Name’s director is, in fact, very much into the idea of a sequel, according to Deadline:

Michael Stuhlbarg, who played Elio Perlman’s father in the original film, confirmed the speculation, saying that director Luca Guadagnino and writer and author of the original book, André Aciman were excited about the prospect.

“He [Guadagnino] seems to think that we might be able to pick up the action a few years later,” Stuhlbarg said, “to see what’s happened to these characters and the choices they’ve made, and life after this particularly momentous summer for them all. But it sounds like something he’s serious about, and André Aciman is thrilled I think at the idea.”

To be fair, a sequel to Call Me by Your Name wouldn’t be completely out of the blue. In the original novel by André Aciman that the film is adapted from, there’s an epilogue in which Elio (played by Timothée Chalamet in the movie) reunites with his former lover Oliver (played by Armie Hammer) at Elio’s family home, where they first spent the summer 20 years ago. In the movie, that epilogue was replaced with Sufjan Stevens and sad gay-zing into the fire, which I did not mind one bit. But for the sequel, Stuhlbarg does allude to going back to the source material: “There are portions of the book that we didn’t mine at thoroughly,” he told Deadline.

And hey, if Guadagnino finds a way to extend that epilogue into a whole second movie, and I get to see my sons Tim-o-té and Armie Hammer make out onscreen again, it’ll be just….peachy.