When the actor Armie Hammer looked like he was on the verge of becoming a big star, it was an endless source of amusement for gossip columnists and sarcastic online commenters that he never quite got to the A-list. It wasn’t that he didn’t get the roles; leads in everything from The Lone Ranger to The Man From U.N.C.L.E looked, on paper, as if they should catapult him into the stratosphere. His chiseled good looks and muscular physique seemed to suggest that he had all the ingredients for Hollywood longevity. And he could act, too, as could be seen by his much-acclaimed roles in Call Me By Your Name and his breakthrough part in David Fincher’s The Social Network. But then it all went horribly, bizarrely wrong.
There are not many upper B-list actors, or many other people for that matter, who become notorious for sharing cannibalistic fantasies, but that is precisely what happened to Hammer. It transpired that while he was (supposedly) happily married to Elizabeth Chambers, he had been carrying on sadomasochistic extra-marital affairs with various women, and that he had explicitly and at times almost comically detailed his sexual urges. In one message, he wrote “I am 100 percent a cannibal” and in another suggested “If I fucked you into a vegetative state id [sic] keep you, feed you, watch you, and keep fucking you…Till you are so sore and broken…. I can’t stop thinking of [fucking] your actual brain.”
There have been several cancelled actors of late, including Kevin Spacey, Gina Carano and James Franco. Sometimes the reasons for cancellation are sexual peccadilloes, heterosexual or homosexual; in other cases, the prevailingly left-wing establishment of Hollywood is not prepared to accept an openly MAGA thespian. But Hammer’s fall from grace was abrupt, surprising and, to a certain kind of commentator, bleakly hilarious. He was seen as coming from a wealthy, plutocratic dynasty, and his perverted sexual tastes stemmed from a position of entitlement. To them, and maybe to others too, he deserved everything he got.
Cancellation is hard for anyone, no matter where you stand on the Hollywood ladder. Hammer claims that he was left broke, divorced, semi-estranged from his children and reduced to living on the kindness of friends. For someone who had once been expected to be the next Batman or Superman, becoming Rent-Man was a humiliating step down. He headed to the Cayman Islands, got a job as a timeshare salesman and reconciled with his father Michael, who eventually died of cancer.
And then Uwe Boll, patron saint of cancelled and desperate actors, came knocking, and offered him the lead role in his new vigilante thriller Citizen Vigilante, about a pissed-off American who starts killing migrant criminals. Hammer told The Hollywood Reporter that, when he was offered the job, his first acting role in five years, “I’m pretty sure I cried. 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.”
Hammer as our generation’s Charles Bronson
The film is released this week in the United States, and as with all Boll’s work, it is not expected to return Hammer to any kind of particular visibility or critical kudos. Its trailer suggests a 21st century version of Michael Winner’s Death Wish films, with Hammer as our generation’s Charles Bronson. It will undoubtedly be criticized heavily by those who find the film’s treatment of migrants as responsible for society’s crimes cartoonish and irresponsible.
Yet it still marks the beginning of the comeback trail for its lead, who has eagerly given interviews and been photographed for the trade press, who seem to have received the idea of Armie Hammer, reformed movie star with a degree of cautious enthusiasm. And why not? It worked for Robert Downey Jr, who rebounded from years of drug addiction and incarceration to become one of the biggest stars on the planet, thanks to Marvel and Iron Man.
Still, perhaps crucially, there might be one difference. Downey Jr, Franco, Spacey et al may have had their peccadilloes and failings, but none of them ever actually announced that they were going to eat one of their sexual conquests. Hammer himself told the Hollywood Reporter, of his various messages, that “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.” Some would argue that it was never that funny in the first place, but time will tell who has the last laugh.
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