Nearly a year later, in February 2018, director Guadagnino finally denied the rumors in an interview with Yahoo! Movies UK. "That's a complete fake news," he said. "They made a picture of my actor Lutz Ebersdorf and they claimed it was Tilda in makeup. I don't know why and I don't know who."
In a separate (and more recent) interview with Deadline, which was published in August 2018, Guadagnino doubled down on his claims that Ebersdorf is a real person. When asked how the casting came about, he said, "We wanted to have a fresh face. Someone who was born on screen with this movie. We wanted someone who could embody the tragedy of the 20th century somehow. His character wants to try to survive but also claw back what he has lost." But isn't it peculiar that he doesn't offer any specifics as to how, exactly, they found Ebersdorf? Isn't there an intense specificity to the phrase "someone who was born on screen with this movie," as though they literally invented a person so that he could appear in the film?
