Chloë Sevigny: Luca Guadagnino ‘Gave Me a Stink Eye’ for Gasping at ‘Bones & All’ Cannibal Scenes
Samantha Bergeson
Chloë Sevigny may have starred in “American Psycho,” but it was the “Bones and All” cannibal sequences that really shook her to the bone. Yet director Luca Guadagnino wasn’t having it.
Sevigny told Interview magazine that the “Suspiria” auteur gave her the “stink eye” at the world premiere of “Bones and All” at the 2022 Venice Film Festival due to her loud gasps in the theater. “Bones and All” centers on a cannibal couple, played by Timothée Chalamet and Taylor Russell, who hunt vagrants to quench their thirsts.
“The first time I saw it I was so vocal, but I’m also a very vocal moviegoer,” Sevigny said. “I’m one of those people in the theater that’s like gasping and shouting. Even in Venice, I gasped during one of the cannibal scenes, and Luca [Guadagnino] turned and gave me a stink eye.
Sevigny said, “I was like, ‘Oh my god. Wait until you screen this in New York and you get some New Yorkers in the theater, then it’s really going to come alive.'”
Sevigny noted that her small role includes a voiceover and “some growling” while keeping her particular shocking sequence under wraps. “Oddly Luca texted me. He’s like, ‘I’m in the Midwest and doing this movie. I have a small but pivotal role. Would you come and do it?'” Sevigny said of how she came to star in the project. “And I was like, ‘I would come for one line for you.’ Then, I got the script. I was like, ‘I don’t even have one line.'”
She joked, “And I was like, ‘This motherfucker, again.'”
The film premieres November 23 in theaters and screens at the 2022 New York Film Festival, following its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival. The “Bones and All” ensemble cast includes Mark Rylance, Michael Stuhlbarg, and “Halloween Ends” writer-director David Gordon Green. “Bones and All” is written by “Suspiria” scribe David Kajganich and adapted from Camille DeAngelis’ 2015 YA novel.
Director Guadagnino told IndieWire that “only Timothée can play this role” in a cannibal love story that is distinctly not in the horror genre.
“I think ‘Suspiria’ was aggressively provocative. I think this one is much more serene in its sense of self,” Guadagnino previously said. “My true hope is that the audience doesn’t reject the movie as a provocation because it deals with a taboo like cannibalism.”
Guadagnino continued, “With ‘Bones and All,’ I wasn’t interested at all in the shock value, which I hate. I was interested in these people. I understood their moral struggle very deeply. I understood what was happening to them. I am not there to judge anybody. You can make a movie about cannibals if you’re there in the struggle with them, and you’re not codifying cannibalism as a topic or a tool for horror.”
