‘We Are Who We Are’, Luca Guadagnino’s First TV Show, Is More Tender Than ‘Call Me By Your Name’

For fans of Call Me By Your Name, there are many familiar facets to draw you into director Luca Guadagnino’s first TV show, We Are Who We Are.

The eight-part series is also a queer coming-of-age set in a sinewy Italian summer; its male lead, Fraser, has a slouched awkwardness reminiscent of Elio; sections of the soundtrack recall Ryuichi Sakamoto’s plodding, curious piano; and, if you look super closely, you might even spot stars Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer as extras.

But over its eight episodes, the show slowly establishes a world with its own, considered tone, a coming-of-age based in friendship rather than obsession. Or, more accurately, obsessive friendship, as two teenagers, Fraser and Caitlin, find within each other a sounding board for their questions about gender and sexuality while living on a US army base in Italy, complete with KFC and white-picket houses.

“Initially, there’s this magnetism, but at the same time — you know when you get two magnets and you put them at the wrong end?,” says 17-year-old Jack Dylan Grazer, who plays Fraser, over Zoom.

He’s miming out the action where magnets are repulsed, refusing to connect — until one gives in and flips. That flip happens off-camera on We Are Who We Are: between episodes, Caitlin and Fraser suddenly fuse.

“And then, by the end, when they find their comfortability with each other, they find these questions in themself, but they’re the ones who answer each other’s questions of that internal,” says Grazer. “They find solace in each other most of all. Uh, they are each other’s destinies, in a sense.”

But destinies are usually destroyed, not created, by the military-industrial complex the teens find themselves living within. As a force, it lingers in the background of the otherwise tender show as a quiet, unnerving violence.

In the first episode, Fraser is the new kid on the base, arriving after one of his two mothers (Chlöe Sevigny) is promoted to colonel, just before the 2016 election. Caitlin lives next door, comfortable enough in the ecosystem, with a boyfriend and group to drink off-base and go to the beach with.

Fraser is a brat through-and-through and misses New York immediately, but, from afar, recognises cracks in Caitlin he has himself. Eventually, a friendship grows, against the confines of the base and Caitlin’s conservative, Trump-supporting father (Kid Cudi), who at one point describes Fraser as a “New York fashion-victim”.

“The title of the show really is self-explanatory — We Are Who We Are — but to get in more depth, it’s really just [about] people trying to understand who they are and where they come from,” says newcomer Jordan Kristine Seamón, seventeen, who plays Caitlin.

“What I love so much about it is that it’s not a textbook thing because life, in my opinion, isn’t a textbook thing…. [And] the show is really comfortable [with the idea] trying to figure out who you are and who you can become [while] letting that be a fluid thing, letting that be open and something that you can figure out later on down the line. It’s not having to know and understand everything at that particular moment in time.”

Time Will Tell, Maybe

We Are Who We Are is difficult to predict, can feel aimless, and often lets odd moments linger and pass without a conclusion. This isn’t ‘Euphoria in Italy’, with no traditional awakening moments, and conventional plot-points (death, sex, break-ups) tend to just occur.

Instead, the show is propelled forward by its leads’ anticipation at becoming their ‘full selves’, still at an age where it feels like you will simply arrive all at once — even if the base’s adults clearly show that’s not the case.

Of course, the teens don’t pay all that much attention to their parents, and the relationships are strained at best. Caitlin’s more ‘tomboy-ish’ hobbies are a source of bonding with her father, but exploring her masculinity any further is an unspoken impossibility, while Fraser is volatile and physical with his mothers, particularly Sarah (Sevigny).

“A big factor in that is that he resents his mother for the absence of a male [figure] in his life,” Grazer says. “As much as he doesn’t really like the idea of conventionalism or conformity or whatever,  he craves it because he never experienced it and you want to experience everything, but still he doesn’t want anything normal.”

“Like he could live without going to the prom because it’s ‘cliché’ or something, but he wants to experience a dad. I think that it adds a lot to his confusion and his constant questioning of who he is and why he is. And I think he takes a lot of that out on his own mom.”

Perhaps the show’s tone comes, in some part, from Gudagnino’s willingness to listen to Seamón and Grazer, as well as the other teen actors (including Francesca Scorsese, aka Marty’s daughter). Seamón, who had only worked in theatre prior, found the set really inviting, especially to be able to change the dialogue and admit when things didn’t feel true.

“He would tell us what his general idea for it was,” says Seamón. “And then he would ask us on particular spots, ‘would you actually do this as a 14-year-old?’, ‘Did you ever do this as a 14-year-old?'”

“I don’t wanna spoil anything, but on certain scenes where stuff got a little bit heavier, I always felt super comfortable being able to go to Luca and ask like, ‘Hey, do you think this might work in the scene?’, And he’d be like, ‘yeah, sure. Let’s try it’.”

Grazer said the collaborative approach was unlike anything he’d filmed before (such as It or Shazam), where he’d been mostly told what to do and how. Given Fraser’s rarely seen in the show without earphones in, he made a playlist for the character: Guadagnino ended up including some songs in the show.

But one artist who was always central to We Are Who We Are is Blood Orange, aka Dev Hynes. Not only did he compose the score, but his ballad ‘Time Will Tell’ is something of a mantra for Frasier and Caitlin, as they resist labels for the time being, still feeling things out.

Infatuations And Fake Moustaches

Caitlin is, in many respects, stronger than Fraser. Where he’s timid save for his tantrums or his designer fashion (pairing 3/4 leopard print shorts with a colourful Bernhard Willhelm military vest?), she’s already sneaking out of the base to bars as ‘Harper’ to grab girls’ numbers.

In Seamón’s own words, she takes ‘no BS’. To prepare for the role, Seamón says she did a lot of research to fully understand Caitlin’s exploration of her gender-identity, beyond the YouTube holes Fraser and Caitlin find themselves in.

“I didn’t want to solely have a textbook idea of what it was like to question or transition — [and] at the time I hadn’t read the full script, so I didn’t know where it ended,” she says.

“I just wanted to get as much information as I could…I also wanted to get some real stories. I was lucky enough — I am still lucky, what am I talking about? — I have friends that are all over the place, [from] transitioning to pre-transitioning to gender-fluid and just, in general, questioning their gender identity. ”

“They were amazing, so candid and open and they were so happy to share the story with me. I tried to take bits and pieces from everybody’s story and try to add that into my performance. I think I did it. I’ve talked to a few of them and they’re really happy with the show so far. I think it did an okay job.”

While chatting, Seamón says she identified more and more with Caitlin as filming went on, coming home with much of the character’s confidence — and since we talked, Caitlin has publicly identified as bisexual and gender-fluid herself).

Grazer says he had to “surrender” to Fraser while filming, leaning into his own disorientation in Italy. Talking to him, it’s clear that the two share the same frenzied enthusiasm for art, if not fashion.

“I was such a rookie in like the realm of fashion… I would say I just wore clothes,” he says, though things have since changed. “So Luca organised me to talk to [designer, influencer] Mike The Ruler on the phone. I remember asking him a question, like, ‘what is it about fashion that speaks to you?’. And he was like, ‘dude, cause it’s an art form’.”

But Fraser is most infatuated with people he thinks ‘gets it’, none more than major Jonathan (Tom Mercier), who works closely with his mum. They’re no Elio and Oliver: what Fraser sees in Jonathan is the potential aesthetic for two outsiders being outside together, the sole loaners of a library copy of Ocean Vuong’s poetry.

“I don’t think it even needs to be Jonathan, to be honest,” says Grazer. “But it is Jonathan and I think Jonathan is perfect, but it didn’t need to be Jonathan. It could have been anybody.”

Still, it’s hard not to be swept up by Fraser’s and the show’s giddiness, where everything, even liking the same song or book, feels like destiny. Maybe it is: time will tell.

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We Are Who We Are‘s eight episodes are all streaming on SBS On Demand. 

Jared Richards is a staff writer at Junkee, and freelancer who has written for The Guardian, The Big Issue and more. He’s on Twitter.