Armie Hammer Wants a Second Chance: “I Made These Problems for Myself” (Exclusive)

The last time I had dinner with Armie Hammer, he drove us up Pacific Coast Highway in his black pickup truck and ordered mutton shank at a Greek spot in Malibu. That was November 2017, Call Me by Your Name was about to open and the world was his. He was 31, absurdly handsome, resistant of the label “movie star” — and bracing for something on the horizon.

“Given my history,” he told me that afternoon, referring to a string of box office disappointments, “I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

The shoe dropped. What followed was one of the most total and public collapses of a Hollywood career in recent history. The scandal consumed him so completely that for a stretch, he was living in a 200-square-foot hole of a flat in Venice Beach, paying for groceries with a debit card a friend had pressed into his hand. He went to the Cayman Islands. He built a farm. He carried a burner flip phone he bought at a gas station. He got no work for five years.

Now it’s a Tuesday night in June, nine years after that PCH drive, and we are on the bustling terrace of a discreet industry canteen in West Hollywood. Hammer arrives a few minutes late. He spots me, offers a quick wave, then changes course entirely to offer an enthusiastic greeting — big smiles, hearty hugs — to a man across the courtyard. Many heads turn his way.

After a minute or two, he makes his way over to me. He apologizes for the detour, explaining the man is another father at his daughter’s primary school.

“I called my publicist on the way here,” he says as I tactfully place a recorder on the corner of the table. “She asked if I was sure about this. I told her: ‘Do you think anything Seth can write is going to move the needle compared to what I’ve been through the last five years?’ “

He orders an Arnold Palmer and inspects the menu. He is clean-shaven, 39 years old and looks far from broken. In fact, he looks quite good — still trim, still tall (he’s 6- foot-5) and several degrees more rugged than the boy I met in 2017.

Yes, Armie Hammer is back. The question, however, is what “back” means for a man like this now.

***

Nine years ago, Hammer seemed to exist at the precise intersection of genetics, legacy and timing that occasionally produces a superstar. Great-grandson of the Russian-Jewish oil tycoon Armand Hammer, whose name still graces buildings across Los Angeles, he had grown up between Beverly Hills and the Cayman Islands, emerged from his teens with Polo-ad looks and old-school ease in front of cameras.

His breakthrough came playing both Winklevoss twins in David Fincher’s The Social Network. What followed — The Lone Ranger, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and finally Call Me by Your Name — was a career that kept almost arriving.

He was funny about it then. “I’ve heard the ‘This is your moment’ speech so many times,” I remember him saying with a sigh during our first encounter. “The way I look at it is, I’m building a collage of my work.” And enjoying himself as much as he could in the process.

“I used to call myself a consumer,” he tells me now. “Drinks, women, validation, experiences — I just wanted to consume. All of it. More, more, more.” He pauses. “I didn’t actually know how to give myself what I needed internally, so I relied on external sources. It’s like a black hole — no matter how much you throw in, it’s gone. You’re never going to fill up a black hole.”

There was also, underneath all that consumption, something more corrosive. “I had a bit of imposter syndrome,” he says. “I was like, ‘I don’t really belong here, but it seems like I’m here — so maybe I’ll have a martini, that’ll make me feel better about the fact that I’m here.’ “

Four years later, the collage he was building went up in flames. What happened is public record. Several women came forward with accounts of psychological and sexual abuse. Explicit messages attributed to Hammer had circulated online describing graphic sexual and cannibalistic fantasies. A woman with whom he carried on a four-year affair — all while married to ex-wife Elizabeth Chambers — accused him of rape. He denied the allegations. An LAPD investigation was opened and later closed without charges. For many, none of that settled anything. The messages alone were specific enough — and disturbing enough — that those who read them have not been able to unread them. The career, already faltering, ended entirely.

His WME agents dropped him; his publicist was gone. He is now represented by a single entertainment attorney whose primary job is contracts and who told Hammer, when asked to make some calls on his behalf, “That’s not really what I do.”

What followed was genuine chaos. Friends who texted their support privately were targeted by internet obsessives and doxed, he says. Hammer changed his phone number repeatedly until he gave up entirely and bought a burner flip phone at a gas station, carrying it for a year and a half.

For a stretch, he was couch surfing, staying in friends’ places while they traveled. He ended up in the Venice apartment — a rent-controlled space so small, it had a Murphy bed. The Hammer family fortune, such as it remains, was not a safety net. After his father died, he received nothing. “It’s just one of those things that’s so complicated, you have to be a tax attorney to fully understand it,” he says of the estate. “But the end result was not I’m set for the rest of my life, or even for the next couple of years. It hasn’t been that.”

I ask, carefully, about reports that his ex-wife played some role in what unfolded. He doesn’t take the bait, but he doesn’t entirely deflect it, either. “It doesn’t help my situation to make it worse for somebody else to try to save my own ass,” he says. “And all I’m doing is making something worse for someone who was for a long time the sole breadwinner of the family. If I disrupt that, it’s my kids who suffer.”

Hammer could write a handbook to surviving an epic cancellation: He got off social media. He read Pema Chödrön. He developed a philosophical framework for surviving the experience of having the entire internet decide it hates you. “There was a period where I was obsessively reading what people were saying,” he says. “And then it hit critical mass, and I thought: There is no nutritional value in this for me. This is almost not even the real world.” He cites a Tyler, the Creator tweet about cyberbullying, circa 2012, and pulls it up on his phone. (“Hahahahahahahaha How The Fuck Is Cyber Bullying Real,” the tweet begins.)

“I realized I could just focus on myself and my kids and staying healthy and growing as a person. You can make that your purpose,” he says.

What saved him, he says, was his father.

The family, including his wife — who had already filed for divorce — had retreated to the Cayman Islands when COVID hit. His father, Michael, held Caymanian citizenship, which gave them access to an island that for the first year of the pandemic had essentially zero cases. Schools stayed open. Restaurants stayed open. While Los Angeles descended into Zoom school and anxiety, his kids were outside, living something close to a normal childhood.

“It really was idyllic for the kids,” he says.

His relationship with his father had been complicated for years — two strong personalities, with accumulated grievances on both sides. When the scandal broke, Michael Hammer wanted to go to war with his son’s accusers. “He was furious,” Armie says. ” ‘I’m going to call this person, I’m going to do this, we have to make sure they know this.’ He really wanted to go on the offensive.

“I said: ‘Look, dude, I’m already on the cross,’ ” he continues. ” ‘The nails are in my hands. I’m not getting off this cross no matter what we do. And the more I struggle, the longer I’m going to be up here.’ “

He had come to believe, through whatever combination of self-help reading and desperation and time, that acceptance was the only viable strategy. “That which you resist persists. That which you accept transforms,” he says, reciting mantra. “There was nothing I could say that was going to fix anything for me.”

Then his father got sick, and the old grievances stopped mattering.

“He was still able to be a lifeline,” Hammer says. Michael owned a small apartment building on the island and gave his son a unit to stay in. But as Michael’s illness progressed, it was his son who became the lifeline: “I would bathe him and cook food for him and feed him and change his diapers and do all that stuff.” It transformed their relationship, just in time. “We got to have all those conversations,” he says. “We got to have an amends with each other. We got to really move through it. And then I got to be there holding his hand when he died. Which is like a gift.”

Still raw from his father’s death, he found himself one afternoon talking to a man he describes only as “an old Jamaican guy.” Hammer had been complaining that his industry friends were sending sympathetic texts but not publicly defending him. The Jamaican man looked at him.

“What kind of friend are you?” he said. He explained: Your house is burning down right now, in real time. You want your friends to run into a burning house? What happens to them if they do?

“They get burned,” Hammer said.

“Do you want your friends to get burned?”

“No.”

“So if you were really a good friend, what would you want your friends to do?”

Hammer thought about it. “I would want them to stay as far away from the fire as possible.”

The man patted his leg. “Now you’re thinking like a real friend.” Then he stood up and walked away.

“I think that was a spiritual moment,” Hammer says. “Joseph Campbell would have called it a mentor moment in my hero’s journey, whatever the fuck that is.”

***

He came back to Los Angeles in 2024, and about a year and a half later, an email arrived. It was from Uwe Boll — the German filmmaker whose decades of aggressively low-budget, critically dismissed genre films had transformed him into something of a cult figure, the kind of director whose name functions as its own punchline. Boll wanted Hammer for a movie. It was the first offer he had received in five years.

“I’m pretty sure I cried,” Hammer says. “It was just this moment where I was like: I’m going to get to do the thing that I love more than anything — other than my children.”

He pauses.

“I would have done a fucking cat food commercial. I just wanted to work again.”

But underneath was something more unsettling: He wasn’t sure he could remember how to act. “I was scared shitless until the moment Uwe said action for the first time,” he says. “And then I was like — ‘Wait. I do know how to do this.’ There’s a reason I had the success I had.”

The film, shot in Croatia, is called Citizen Vigilante. Boll’s methods are famously economical: The script was around 50 pages when Hammer received it. “I was like, ‘Where’s the rest?’ ” He adopts a thick German accent as Boll: ” ‘No, no, no! Ve just go and shoot and have fun. Ve vant you to be great!’ ” Hammer laughs at the memory. “I was like, ‘Well, OK?’ “

He has since done three more low-budget films: Frontier Crucible, a Western. Night Driver, a small L.A. thriller about a Mafia errand boy whose night goes sideways. And a film in Bulgaria, playing a real person whose identity he won’t disclose because the project hasn’t been announced. He grew a mustache for it that, paired with a trucker hat in a recent paparazzi photo, generated significant online enthusiasm. “Was I Daddy?” he jokingly inquires after I bring it up.

The professional apparatus is gone entirely. No agents, no manager, no personal publicist. If someone wants to hire Armie Hammer, they go on IMDb Pro and find his attorney. “Lately, they always say on the first day of set, ‘We can’t believe we actually got you to do this.’ ” He pauses. “And I’m like: ‘My schedule was pretty open.’ “

His life now is structured around the children — a daughter, 11, and a son, 9 — with an almost monastic discipline. He is up at 6:30 every morning. He makes his bed. He cleans his apartment. He makes coffee and takes it outside and meditates and does what he calls his “gratitude practice.” Then he walks to his ex-wife’s house, wakes the kids, makes their breakfast, gets them to school. He picks them up most afternoons. He drops them off in the evening.

He lives in a small, rented house in West Hollywood — a minor but welcome upgrade from the Venice shoebox. Returning to Los Angeles after the Caymans was harder than he expected. “I was back in a city that felt like it used to be my city,” he says, “but it had moved on without me.”

Throughout the evening, as he cuts into his medium rare steak frites, I keep waiting for the score-settling. It never comes. He won’t go after his ex-wife when given the opening. He won’t name the industry friends who went quiet — although he will note that his gay friends never turned on him. “They were like, ‘Bitch, you think you’re special? If the Grindr chats got released and someone hacked into those, no one would have a job.’ ” He laughs. “And, by the way,” he adds, referencing his own leaked texts, “if you’re sitting up in your room late at night high as shit just going, ‘This is fucking hilarious. I’m being funny now’ — you take that shit out of context, then you’re done.”

But he does not claim total innocence, either. “I made these problems for myself,” he says. “This didn’t happen to me by a fluke accident. I didn’t do what people are saying I did. But I brought very dangerous and unsafe people into my life, and I pissed off people in my life — and here we are.”

He describes the chaos of the scandal — the doxing, the phone numbers, the siege of it — without identifying a villain. But he acknowledges that his public image is a hurdle he has far from cleared, that he is not yet entirely un-canceled. “It’s like Sisyphus pushing the boulder,” he says, “except my boulder is covered in Vaseline.”

He went to see a movie recently — the hit horror breakout Obsession — and afterward found himself in a conversation about wishes. A friend asked what he would wish for if he could wish for anything. He thought about it seriously. A billion dollars, he decided. Put a chunk of it in an ETF, set the kids up, have some comfort and stability. His friend was surprised: Your wish wouldn’t be going back and undoing everything that’s happened?

“Honestly, no,” he tells me toward the end of our reunion dinner, after the apple tarte tatin à la mode arrives (his suggestion). “I remember the emotional state and the mental state I was in before all that happened. Healthy people don’t act the way I was acting.” He glances down at the table. “I would have loved if I could have had an opportunity to do it in a little bit more of a gentle way,” he says of his struggles since we last sat down together. “But at the end of the day — you get what you get.”

This story appeared in the June 16 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.

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