Armie Hammer Plans Hollywood Comeback and Discusses Eating Animal Hearts | Vanity Fair

In a new podcast interview, Armie Hammer gushes about how fulfilled he was selling timeshares in the Cayman Islands following accusations of sexual misconduct, but paints himself as being very much back on the Hollywood circuit.

“I’ve got offers coming in every week, basically, to the point where I’m having to turn down jobs,” Hammer said on The Louis Theroux Podcast, in the show’s latest episode, published Tuesday on Spotify. (Host Louis Theroux is cousin to actor Justin Theroux.) It’s the latest in a string of interviews from the The Social Network actor, who denies allegations of rape and other mistreatment, which Vanity Fair’s Julie Miller detailed in a 2021 story about Hammer, his accusers, and his family history.

“What was I consuming?” he said pensively when Theroux asked him what drugs he was using around the time of his downfall, which Hammer likened to the fable of Icarus. He didn’t point to a drug of choice, instead saying, “Life. All of it. …I had access, and I had no self-control.”

Hammer says that before he went to rehab in Florida, where he was treated for trauma as well as substance abuse issues, he used people in the same way as drugs: “People were sort of like my bags of dope with skin on them.”

“I'm very quick to admit that I was selfish, and inconsiderate, and an asshole, and a cad, and I used people to make me feel better,” he said. “Is it asshole behavior? Absolutely. There’s no way around that. Does it make me a dick? Absolutely. Like, I have no problem admitting that. I was a dick. That’s not illegal.”

Hammer spent much of the somewhat contentious interview insisting that his reported text messages lacked context. In such messages, he declared, “I am 100 percent a cannibal”; described violent and nonconsensual sexual fantasies; and said he'd “cut the heart out of a living animal before and eaten it while still warm.” To Theroux, he said the animal heart, for instance, was part of a hunting tradition.

He went on to explain, “Sometimes when you’re involved with a person and you’re dating and you guys are having sex and you are a bit of a provocateur and you are exacerbated by alcohol or drugs or anything like that.”

“It’s fun to ruffle feathers and it's fun to push the envelope little by little,' he continued. 'Did I ever have any intention of cutting anything off of anyone or eating anything off of anyone? No. There was never really anything that I wanted. Was it fun to joke about if I was stoned or drunk or like laughing as I was typing these messages? Sure.”

Hammer also said that he thinks his accusers are driven by “you know, people wanting to jump on a wave. People wanting attention, people wanting to be a part of a community. They get a lot of attention, they get a lot of support.”

While he said that he was sober for “about three-and-a-half years,” “I don’t necessarily practice physical sobriety anymore.”

“I don’t get drunk, I don’t get high, I don’t get stoned,” he said. “Not because I’m afraid as an addict that if I have a drink that I’m going to be sucking dick for crack in the alley. It’s not that for me. I just don’t do it because I don’t enjoy it anymore.”

He added that “There’s nothing left in that world that I didn’t try, and I can tell you that of all the things I’ve tried, nothing makes me as happy as I feel today, just being calm, and being chill and being a good dad and being there for my kids.”

He also confirmed that his mother had paid for him to get a vasectomy as a birthday present because he couldn't afford to pay for his own.

Hammer said that he recently finished shooting a film called Frontier Crucible with William H. Macy and Thomas Jane. “Then I’m gonna go do another movie in January, and then I’ve got another movie in March,” he said. “I’ve got a TV show that I was just offered. I’ve got offers coming in every week, basically, to the point where I’m having to turn down jobs.”

About a year after an LAPD investigation did not result in any formal charges, Hammer declared in a July 2024 interview with Bill Maher that he had gotten a “glowing” review after a psychological evaluation in the Cayman Islands as part of his divorce and custody cases with ex-wife Elizabeth Chambers. “By the way, they’re like, ‘he’s got issues, but he’s not what people are saying.’”

In another podcast interview, in June 2024 on the show Painful Lessons, Hammer said he was “grateful” for the accusations and fall from grace, which lead to his publicist and agent dropping him, and being recast in planned projects.

“Whatever it was that people said, whatever it was that happened, I’m now at a place in my life where I’m grateful for every single bit of it,” he said in that interview.

What he’s not so grateful for now, he said in the new interview, is rehashing the controversy.

“Dredging up all that stuff? I don’t love it,” he said, adding that he doesn't “pander to the court of public opinion anymore.”

“I’m very happy that in my life I feel like I’ve moved through all of that and there are no aspects of my life where that stuff still touches my day-to-day, other than the fact that it highlighted for me exactly how much work I have to do on myself, which is still a daily process,” he said at the end of the interview, which spanned more than an hour and focused almost exclusively on explaining his past actions and advocating for himself. “And that’s my journey. My journey is not convincing anybody. My journey is not explaining myself. My journey is not advocating for myself. It’s just not where I’m at.”