Yesterday, with very little warning, Armie Hammer resurfaced. You may remember that in 2021 Hammer’s career ended in an instant, after multiple women came forward to accuse him of varying degrees of abuse. His representatives dropped him, his work dried up and he was forced to sell timeshares in the Cayman Islands to get by. That, everybody thought, was that.
However, in recent months, Hammer has started to re-emerge into public life. He moved back to Los Angeles and made a big deal about selling his car. He was on Piers Morgan’s YouTube channel, and Bill Maher’s podcast. And now it looks as if he’s back for good. Yesterday saw the launch of the first episode of Hammer’s new podcast, Armie HammerTime.
The podcast seems like a fairly irresistible proposition to several marginal groups. The longterm Armie Hammer believers, the dedicated minority who vowed to stick by their hero through thick and thin, finally have an outlet for their support. On the other hand, the podcast promises to be a fresh source of outrage for those who believe he doesn’t deserve any form of outlet at all. And for the millions and millions of rubberneckers who get a weird thrill from watching a handsome former movie star sift through the self-inflicted wreckage of his life? Well, this is perfect for them too.
Just a reminder, though. Launching a podcast doesn’t mean that Armie Hammer has been uncancelled. Hollywood hasn’t unshunned him. He spends some of the first episode saying that the only work he has on the horizon is a bit part job on a low-budget Asian-shot film that nobody will ever see. Plus, he’s podcasting, for crying out loud. Making an independent podcast doesn’t mean that Hollywood has let Armie Hammer back in. If anything, it’s a fairly brutal reminder that it hasn’t.
The Armie HammerTime podcast is, at heart, an interview podcast. The interviews are conducted in Hammer’s home, a tiny rent-controlled apartment with scuffed floorboards and a sofa sourced from Facebook Marketplace for $150. The first episode’s guest is Tom Arnold, a man who also knows a thing or two about imploding his life in full glare of the public.
This might not have been the greatest choice. Arnold has made much hay from mining his lost years for comic material, and so it is here. Want the anecdote about the time Roseanne Barr stabbed him for taking some cookies from her? Want the anecdote about the time he heard that the drummer from Kiss was a homeless crack addict living under a pier, so he kidnapped a homeless crack addict from under a pier, but it wasn’t the drummer from Kiss, and then the drummer from Kiss sued him for $50m? Arnold is more than happy to offer these stories up unprompted and at length.
You can sense Hammer’s frustration with this as the episode wears on. He knows that he’s the story here. The people listening to the podcast want to hear how things have been for him, and how he blew his life up. In the end he’s so constrained that he literally has to ask Arnold to ask him a question, just so that he can get a word in.
The success of the Armie HammerTime podcast will ultimately depend on the level of sincerity with which Hammer has entered into this. If this is as transparently cynical as it may well be – if this is a way for him to remind people that he’s back in town and rehabilitated and available for hire – then its failure is all but guaranteed.
But if he’s doing a podcast to work on himself – if this really is where his intentions lie – then there might be hope for it yet. In a sense, the endeavour reminds me a little of Marc Maron’s WTF. That podcast was started out of desperation, as Maron found himself divorced and jobless and beached, a pariah in his own community. Listen to an early WTF episode and you’ll hear a man saturated in bitterness. His early interviews were less conversations and more opportunities to try to get things straight with his estranged peers.
Little by little, through the simple act of talking it through, Maron changed. He began to engage with the world, learning to act with empathy and not defensiveness. A decade and a half down the line, and Maron has not only fixed his own flaws, but has a Hollywood career to boot. If Armie Hammer is ready to put the work in, and to podcast for the sake of podcasting, then who knows? Fifteen years from now he might also be allowed back in.
