Crowd members at Sundance Film Festival were left stunned after Dakota Johnson took to the stage and made a cannibalism joke about Armie Hammer.
The Fifty Shades Of Grey star appeared at the event to present an award to director Luca Guadagnino, who is known for films such as Bones And All and I Am Love.
Johnson has worked with the director previously on titles including A Bigger Splash and Suspiria, but it was one of the projects they didn't collaborate on that she referenced while on stage.
“It was here at Sundance in 2017 that audiences experienced a film that is uniquely characterised by Luca’s iconic approach to storytelling," she said. “The vision and the style of it is Call Me By Your Name – sadly, I wasn’t in that one."
Call Me By Your Name stars Hammer alongside Timothée Chalamet and tells the story of a romance between a seventeen-year-old student and the older man his father has hired as a research assistant.
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Johnson referenced one moment in particular from the novel the film is based on, which sees the character played by Hammer eat a peach that Chalamet’s character has performed a sexual act on.
During her speech at Sundance, Johnson joked: "Luca had asked me to play the role of the peach, but our schedules conflicted. Thank God, because then I would have been another woman that Armie Hammer tried to eat.”
The quip references allegations which emerged on social media and saw Hammer being accused of sending messages which described graphic sexual fantasies and mentioned cannibalism.
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The messages have not been verified and Hammer slammed them as 'bulls**t', describing them as 'vicious and spurious online attacks'.
However, he ended up losing talent representation and being dropped from a number of projects in the wake of the claims.
Johnson's joke took the audience by surprise and was met with a mixture of gasps, laughs, and applause, but she didn't stop there as she then turned her attention to Bones and All, Guadagnino's most recent film which tells a love story between two cannibals.
Drawing a link with Call Me By Your Name, Johnson commented: "It's been five years since that film premiered here and Luca hasn't stopped taking us to exciting places. Who knew cannibalism was so popular?"
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Guadagnino has previously been forced to deny claims that Bones and All was inspired by the allegations that emerged about Hammer.
Topics: Film and TV, Celebrity
Emily Brown