Armie Hammer admits he now "likes" the fact that he was infamously accused of being a cannibal. The 38-year-old actor discussed the cannibalism allegations that severely impacted his career on the inaugural episode of his new podcast, "Armie HammerTime," which was released on Monday. "It's wild," he told his guest Tom Arnold. "I'm not going to lie, I kind of like the cannibal stuff now."
"The accusations are the thing that make so much noise. Like, what makes more noise? 'Armie Hammer is a cannibal' or 'Armie Hammer might not be a cannibal?'" he questioned. "The cannibal thing makes more noise," he added, "and you don't get an apology tour in this world. Like, someone says something about you, everyone believes it, and they move on with their lives to whatever it is they're focused on, because they've got their own lives."
Arnold, 65, told Hammer, "The great news is that you've worked on yourself." "When something like this happens, we do all this work on ourselves," Hammer responded. "Not so that we can get the jobs back but so that we don't care if we get the jobs back. I think that's where I feel like I am now."
The allegations that the "Call Me by Your Name" actor fantasized about cannibalism surfaced in 2021. In the following year, two women who claimed to have had affairs with Hammer while he was married to his ex-wife, Elizabeth Chambers, spoke out in the docuseries "House of Hammer." Courtney Vucekovich and Julia Morrison alleged that the actor sent them messages detailing cannibalistic fantasies involving them. Amidst these allegations, Hammer also faced accusations of rape, leading the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office to confirm in April 2023 that he was under investigation for possible sexual assault.
Hammer has consistently denied all allegations against him. The LA District Attorney eventually decided there was insufficient evidence to support a trial, and no charges were filed. In a video posted on Instagram on Monday, the same day the podcast's debut episode went live, Hammer discussed the mission statement of his podcast. He aims to host "long-form, interesting conversations with people who have tools or skills or have acquired wisdom... that I don't know [and] I want to learn."
"Some of you are going to love this, and some of you are going to f--king hate it," he added. "The original idea of the podcast was sort of the concept that over the course of a day every single person you interact with knows at least one thing that you don't. So, teach me what that one thing is."
Hammer recently made headlines when he documented his experience selling his truck at Carmax due to financial constraints. The "Death on the Nile" actor last addressed the cannibalism allegations over the summer, describing them as "outlandish." "Now, I'm able to sort of look at it with a sense of distance and perspective and be like, 'That's hilarious,'" Hammer said in June on the "Painful Lessons" podcast. "People called me a cannibal and everyone believed them. They're like, 'Yep, that guy ate people.'"
Hammer explained that he didn't know how to respond to the accusations at the time. "You're just like, 'What? What are you talking about?'" he recalled himself thinking. "'Do you know what you have to do to be a cannibal? You have to eat people. How am I going to be a cannibal?' It was bizarre."
In July, Hammer revealed in a separate interview that he found something "liberating" about having his career and public image destroyed. "It's incredibly liberating," he admitted to Bill Maher on the "Club Random" podcast. "Because so much of my life leading up to there was being preoccupied with how I was perceived, which now you don't have to care about."
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