Armie Hammer said he’s now grateful for the serious accusations that ended his Hollywood career, even though it caused a lot of pain.
Hammer talked about this on the Painful Lessons podcast. He explained that he never felt happy or satisfied with himself before the allegations.
“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. I’m actually now at a place where I’m really grateful for it because where I was in my life before all of that stuff happened to me, I didn’t feel good.
I never felt satisfied. I never had enough. I never was in a place where I was happy with myself, where I had self-esteem. I never knew how to give myself love. I never knew how to give myself self-validation but I had this job where I was able to get it from so many people that I never had to learn how to give it to myself.”
He called it an ‘ego death,’ saying:
“It was an ego death, a career death. A neutron bomb went off in my life. It killed off [everything].”
Now, he says he feels he’s in a better mental place than he was before.
You can watch the full interview below.
He Says Everything Was A Roleplay
Hammer says he talked about his sexual fetishes in private, but it was just roleplay. He argued that you have to actually eat human meat to be a real cannibal, which he did not do:
“People called me a cannibal. Like I ate people! What? Do you know what you have to do to be a cannibal? You have to eat people!”
He was also accused of sexual assault, but the police did not press charges because there wasn’t enough evidence. The accusations still ruined his career and affected his mental health. Hammer received a lot of hate and once even attempted suicide:
“There were a lot of times when I thought I can’t take this anymore. I was getting hate…so it just went right in… there was a time I was standing at the shore and I swam out really far and just laying there… a half-assed suicide attempt…But I thought I couldn’t do that to my kids.”
Hammer admits that his acting career in Hollywood is likely over, and he probably won’t be leading any major movies again. However, he isn’t giving up on his creative work and plans to write a screenplay in the future.
