At this point, what you've heard about Armie Hammer almost certainly overshadows what you think of him as an actor. Despite his work in beloved movies like The Social Network (2010) and Call Me By Your Name (2017), by 2021 he was better known as a guy who was allegedly an abuser, and possibly a cannibal.
Now, Armie Hammer is trying to flip the script. In a new appearance on the podcast Your Mom's House, the actor is taking a stab at clearing a few things up about his public persona. First of all, he's not a cannibal. But, he does admit to being somebody who was very open about his kink lifestyle and admitted that when it came to breaking his squeaky-clean image, he was fairly conscious of trying to self-sabotage.
"I was ‘liking’ rope bondage pictures on my Twitter," he told podcast hosts Tom Segura and Christina Pazsitzky on New Year's Day podcast drop. "It was like I was dog-whistling to it, if you will, and wanting to get caught. People would be like, ‘I don’t think he knows his Twitter likes are public.’ I saw that and I was like, ‘I know.’"
Hammer has long denied the abuse and rape allegations which effectively destroyed his career in 2021. The most prominent of these allegations came from Hammer's ex-girlfriend, Efrosina Angelov, who claimed that Hammer raped her. Later two other women, Courtney Vucekovich and Paige Lorenze, accused Hammer of abuse, both emotional and physical. Legally speaking, Hammer was never formally charged with a crime, but, was dropped from several film projects, and was his divorce from Elizabeth Chambers.
In the intervening years, Hammer has partially copped to being emotionally abusive and manipulative, which he does again here on this podcast, saying that some of the relationships he was in gave him "validation," which he now regrets.
But Hammer denies doing anything that approached a crime, and very firmly dismisses being a cannibal, once calling those rumors "hilarious." In the new podcast, he thinks that some people were focused on his story because of the misery of the 2020 and 2021 lockdowns. "People were deeply unhappy with their own lives. And then this salacious story comes around where this actor wants to murder and eat people. And then suddenly everyone's like 'Oh this is so much more fun to focus on than the fact that I can't leave my own living room.'"
Related: Timothée Chalamet Has One Word to Describe to Armie Hammer's Cannibalism Scandal
In her 2024 book Hammered, Armie's mother, Dru Hammer, wrote: "None of his choices were crimes. In fact, after an extensive look into what happened by the Los Angeles Police Department, all of the allegations were dismissed. Armie was cleared of all legal wrongdoing, but his moral wrongdoing was a different matter."
So, is the world ready for a full Armie Hammer comeback? Maybe. Maybe not. As of this writing, he's set to star in a new western called Frontier Crucible, alongside Thomas Jane and William H. Macy. It's clear his massive status will never be what it once was. But, he seems okay with that. He also says he "loves pickleball" and "will talk about it" nonstop. And, for some, this might be his greatest crime.
