Armie Hammer says he now “likes” that he was infamously accused of being a cannibal.
Hammer, 38, spoke about the cannibalism allegations that derailed his career on the first episode of his new podcast, “Armie HammerTime,” 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?’”
“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.”
Allegations that the “Call Me by Your Name” actor fantasized about cannibalism began to surface in 2021. The following year, two women Hammer allegedly had affairs with while married to his ex-wife, Elizabeth Chambers, gave voice to the rumors when interviewed for the docuseries “House of Hammer.” The women, Courtney Vucekovich and Julia Morrison, claimed the star sent them messages describing cannibalistic fantasies he had about them.
With Hammer facing allegations of rape in addition to cannibalism, the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office confirmed in April 2023 that the actor was being investigated for possible sexual assault. Hammer has consistently denied the allegations made against him.
The LA District Attorney ultimately decided there was not sufficient evidence against Hammer to support a trial, and he was not charged.
Hammer spoke about the mission statement of his podcast in a video he posted on Instagram Monday, the same day the pod’s debut episode went live. Hammer said 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 most recently made headlines when he documented his journey selling his truck at Carmax because he couldn’t afford the gas.
The “Death on the Nile” actor last talked about the cannibalism allegations over the summer, labeling them “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.”
