Eschewing the family fortune, Hollywood “It” guy Armie Hammer has found fame the old-fashioned way: on his own two feet.

Oh, it was such a sleepy, idyllic town until Armie Hammer came along with those chiseled charms of his. Eighteen months ago, the Italian city of Crema drew occasional visitors for its sweet ravioli and the Gothic 17th-century bell tower in the piazza. But then something positively scandalous happened involving an overripe hollowed-out peach, and Crema was anonymous no more.

If you’ve seen Call Me By Your Name, you’re aware of the indelible moment in which Hammer plays erotic muse to last year’s juiciest moment in film. To sidestep spoilers, let’s just say that Timothée Chalamet, Hammer’s young costar in the coming-of-age drama, discovered a fruit-forward way of quenching his desire for Hammer’s character. Heaps of award nominations (including a Golden Globe nod for Hammer’s performance) and a global invasion of drosophilalike movie tourists followed.

“I went back to Crema after Call Me By Your Name had already come out, and walked into the duomo, which had been so calm and lovely when we filmed,” Hammer, 32, says, shaking his head a little in the courtyard of a Hollywood hotel. At 6 feet, 5 inches with bright blue eyes and a polished smile, the movie star in the conversation is impossible to mistake for someone else. “A few girls were standing together looking at their phones, and one of them looked up at me and just went, ‘Holy f—! There he is!’ And I thought, That’s it. Everything’s different here now.”

You could say that about Hammer too. The actor noticed a change at the Oscars last year. The first time he attended, in 2011, to support The Social Network (through the magic of split screens, Hammer played both of the Winklevoss twins, who claimed the Facebook idea was theirs), he felt lost in the blur. “You’re on the red carpet looking around at all the insanity going, ‘What the hell?’” he says. “It was like being in a car accident.” But last year, the experience was one to savor. “I walked into a situation where suddenly I’d done a lot of work with a bunch of different people, and it was all, ‘Hey, how are you?’ ‘Oh, wow, great to see you.’ ‘Isn’t this fantastic?’”

Hammer’s orbit continues to widen. This season, he appears opposite Felicity Jones and Justin Theroux in On the Basis of Sex, a biopic directed by Mimi Leder about the life of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Hammer plays Marty Ginsburg, a husband-of-the-century type who cooked and cleaned, and also argued cases alongside his wife in support of her pioneering legal career. “I talked to a lot of Marty’s law students and family members, and said, ‘Be totally honest—he couldn’t have been as great a guy as we’re making him out to be,’ and they all said, ‘You’re right. He was better.’ What the hell do you do with that as an actor?” Hammer obviously figured it out: The role is getting early Oscars buzz in the best supporting actor category. [Source]