Nine years after a scandal detonated his Hollywood career, Armie Hammer says he’s working again and living in tighter routines with his children. In a new June interview, he reflects on how his “other shoe” fell, what he believes he did wrong, the pressure he
When Armie Hammer arrives late to a Tuesday-night dinner in West Hollywood, it’s not quiet. He spots someone across the courtyard and breaks into big smiles and hearty hugs, drawing attention as he moves through the terrace like he’s still navigating a world that knows his face.
Then, minutes later, he comes over to the table where a recorder has been set down tactfully. He apologizes for the detour—not to anyone here. but because the man he hugged is another father at his daughter’s primary school. The conversation lands on something simple and domestic. and yet it’s framed by something enormous: nine years since a public collapse that consumed his life so completely he says he ended up living in a Venice Beach flat so small it was described as a “200-square-foot hole. ” paying for groceries with a debit card a friend pressed into his hand.
It was November 2017 the last time he drove him and others up Pacific Coast Highway. ordering mutton shank at a Greek spot in Malibu. He was 31. Call Me by Your Name was about to open. and he told the people around him—looking at his own past of box office disappointments—that he was waiting for consequences.
“Given my history,” he said that afternoon, referring to his string of box office disappointments, “I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
He now describes what happened next as one of the most total and public collapses of a Hollywood career in recent history—and he still speaks about it like it was a physical event, something that didn’t leave much room to breathe.
The scandal, which he says became impossible to shake, involved multiple allegations and leaked explicit messages attributed to him. Several women came forward with accounts of psychological and sexual abuse. Explicit messages attributed to Hammer circulated online describing graphic sexual and cannibalistic fantasies. A woman with whom he carried on a four-year affair—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. Hammer says that for many. none of that settled anything. and he points to the messages alone—specific enough and disturbing enough that those who read them have not been able to unread them. The career, he says, ended entirely.
His WME agents dropped him; his publicist was gone. He says he is now represented by a single entertainment attorney whose primary job is contracts. When Hammer asked that attorney to make some calls on his behalf, he says the response was: “That’s not really what I do.”
From there, the period he describes as chaos turns into a portrait of isolation. He says friends who texted their support privately were targeted by internet obsessives and doxed. He 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 says he was couch surfing, staying in friends’ places while they traveled. He ended up in a Venice apartment described as rent-controlled and so small it had a Murphy bed.
He also says the Hammer family fortune, such as it remains, did not become a safety net. After his father died. he says he received nothing and called the estate “so complicated” that he would “have to be a tax attorney” to fully understand it. The end result. he says. was not “I’m set for the rest of my life. or even for the next couple of years. ” but “It hasn’t been that.”.
In the same breath. Hammer pushes back against the idea that this was someone else’s plan or someone else’s mistake to fix. Asked carefully about reports that his ex-wife played some role. 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.”.
His return to work. he says. didn’t arrive with a triumphant offer from the industry he had once seemed to glide through. It arrived later, almost quietly. He came back to Los Angeles in 2024. and about a year and a half later. he says an email arrived from Uwe Boll—the German filmmaker known for decades of aggressively low-budget. critically dismissed genre films that made him a cult figure. Boll wanted him for a movie. Hammer says 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 then adds, without romance, what his hunger for work really meant: “I would have done a fucking cat food commercial. I just wanted to work again.”
Still, he describes a fear underneath that hope: 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. Then, he says, it clicked. “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 is called Citizen Vigilante. Hammer says it was shot in Croatia and that Boll’s process was famously economical: the script was around 50 pages when he received it. Hammer says he asked where the rest was. He describes Boll’s response with a thick German accent: “No, no, no!. Ve just go and shoot and have fun. Ve vant you to be great!” Hammer laughs at the memory, saying he replied, essentially: “Well, OK?”.
Since then, Hammer has 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 in which he says he plays a real person whose identity he won’t disclose because the project hasn’t been announced. He says he grew a mustache for that project. and that a trucker hat he wore in a recent paparazzi photo generated significant online enthusiasm. When the topic comes up, he jokingly asks, “Was I Daddy?”.
Now, he says, the professional apparatus around him is mostly gone. No agents. No manager. No personal publicist. If someone wants to hire him, he says they go on IMDb Pro and find his attorney. On set. he says. the reaction is often disbelief: “Lately. they always say on the first day of set. ‘We can’t believe we actually got you to do this.’” He pauses and answers himself: “And I’m like: ‘My schedule was pretty open.’”.
His daily life. he says. is built around his children—his daughter. 11. and his son. 9—with a discipline he describes as almost monastic. He is up at 6:30 every morning. He makes his bed. cleans his apartment. makes coffee and takes it outside and meditates through what he calls his “gratitude practice.” He then walks to his ex-wife’s house. wakes the kids. makes breakfast. gets them to school. picks them up most afternoons. and drops them off in the evening.
He lives in a small rented house in West Hollywood. which he frames as a “minor but welcome upgrade” from the Venice shoebox. He says returning to Los Angeles after the Cayman Islands 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.”.
Part of what he’s still negotiating is the internet’s memory. He says he got off social media and leaned into reading. including Pema Chödrön. building what he describes as a philosophical framework for surviving the fact that the entire internet had decided it hates you. He recounts a period where he says he was obsessively reading what people were saying, until it hit “critical mass.”.
He quotes a Tyler, the Creator tweet from around 2012, which begins: “Hahahahahahahaha How The Fuck Is Cyber Bullying Real.” He says it was part of his point of reference for what cyberbullying does to a person.
“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 he describes as a turning point wasn’t a press strategy or a redemption arc. It was his father.
When COVID hit. he says the family—including his wife. who had already filed for divorce—retreated to the Cayman Islands. He says his father. Michael. held Caymanian citizenship. which gave them access to an island where. for the first year of the pandemic. he says there were essentially zero cases. He says schools stayed open and restaurants stayed open. and that while Los Angeles descended into Zoom school and anxiety. his kids were outside living something close to normal childhood. “It really was idyllic for the kids,” he says.
Hammer describes his relationship with his father as complicated for years—two strong personalities, with accumulated grievances. When the scandal broke, he says Michael wanted to go to war with his son’s accusers. “He was furious,” Hammer 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.”.
Hammer told him, he says, that he was already in the worst place. “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 later says acceptance became the only strategy that mattered—described through the mantra he recites: “That which you resist persists. That which you accept transforms.” And he adds: “There was nothing I could say that was going to fix anything for me.”
Then his father got sick, and Hammer says the old grievances stopped mattering. “He was still able to be a lifeline,” he says. He says Michael owned a small apartment building on the island and gave his son a unit to stay in. As the illness progressed. he says it was his son who became the lifeline—bathing him. cooking food. feeding him. changing his diapers. “It transformed their relationship, just in time,” he says.
He also says he got to have the conversations and move through what he calls an amends. “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, even in that grief, Hammer says he learned something about loyalty from a man he calls “an old Jamaican guy.” He tells the story of being troubled because he says his industry friends were sending sympathetic texts but not publicly defending him. Hammer says the man challenged him.
“What kind of friend are you?” the man asked, Hammer says, explaining: “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.”
The man then asked: “Do you want your friends to get burned?”
Hammer says he answered: “No.”
And then the man asked what a real friend would want. Hammer says he thought about it and said: “I would want them to stay as far away from the fire as possible.”
Hammer says the man patted his leg and responded: “Now you’re thinking like a real friend.” Then the man 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.”
When the conversation returns to now, Hammer doesn’t build the night toward a dramatic revenge. Throughout the dinner, as he cuts into medium rare steak frites, Hammer refuses to chase certain openings. He won’t go after his ex-wife when given the chance. He also won’t name the industry friends who went quiet. He does note that his gay friends never turned on him. He recalls their view: “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 as he adds: “And. by the way. ” 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 doesn’t 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—doxing, phone numbers, what he calls the siege—without identifying a villain. He acknowledges that his public image is still a hurdle he has far from cleared. He says he is not yet entirely un-canceled, likening it to Sisyphus. “It’s like Sisyphus pushing the boulder,” he says, “except my boulder is covered in Vaseline.”.
Later in the night, after his apple tarte tatin à la mode arrives—his suggestion—he tells another story about wishes. He recently saw a movie called Obsession, a hit horror breakout. Afterward, a friend asked him what he would wish for if he could wish for anything. Hammer says he answered with “a billion dollars. ” putting a chunk of it into an ETF to set the kids up and create comfort and stability.
His friend was surprised and asked if his wish wouldn’t be going back and undoing everything that’s happened.
Hammer says his answer was no. “Honestly, no,” he tells him. “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 adds, looking down at the table, that he would have wanted a softer road: “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 the struggles since he last sat down with the people he knew before the scandal.
But he lands on acceptance again. “But at the end of the day — you get what you get.”
The story first appeared in the June 16 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine.
Armie Hammer Hollywood scandal Citizen Vigilante Uwe Boll West Hollywood Venice Beach Elizabeth Chambers Cayman Islands doxing burner phone Call Me by Your Name