Armie Hammer admits to being a ‘dick’ to women in the past: ‘That’s not illegal’

Sydney Bucksbaum is a writer at Entertainment Weekly covering all things pop culture – but TV is her one true love. She currently lives in Los Angeles but grew up in Chicago so please don’t make fun of her accent when it slips out.

Armie Hammer is fessing up to mistreating women in the past — but he’s also stressing that his bad behavior never broke the law.

In a new podcast interview four years after his Hollywood career was wrecked by a scandal that included allegations of sexual assault, the embattled actor said, “I’m very quick to admit that I was selfish, and inconsiderate, and an a–hole, and a cad, and I used people to make me feel better.”

Speaking on The Louis Theroux Podcast, Hammer, 38, continued: “People were sort of like my bags of dope with skin on them. You make me feel amazing, so I’m going to throw everything into this, and we’re going to have this whirlwind romance, and I’m going to whisk you up, and we’re going to go on trips, and we’re going to do all this, and then I’m going to bring you home and I’m going to go, ‘Thanks so much, that was great,’ and then I’m going to move on.”

Hammer said he was guilty of “love bombing” women, only to quickly drop them and move on to someone new. “I would go do something almost exactly the same with someone else,” he explained. “And I left a lot of people in that wake very angry at me for my behavior, which, by the way, I’m not angry. A–hole behavior, there’s no way around that… Does it make me a dick? Absolutely. I have no problem admitting that I was a dick. That’s not illegal.”

Hammer went on to argue that his past behavior is “also being conflated… by this culture that we’re in now,” referring to cancel culture. “At this point, I don’t know that I’d buy into any of the cancel, we need to this and that,” he said in response to a question of whether he’d work with controversial filmmaker Woody Allen. “If I say, ‘No, I would never work with Woody Allen,’ then all I’m doing is saying, ‘I believe in this system that cancels people.’”

Once a rising star in Hollywood, with credits including The Social Network, The Lone Ranger, and Call Me by Your Name, Hammer has been accused of sexual assault and having erotic cannibalistic fantasies. He has consistently denied that he ever broke the law and has maintained that all his romantic relationships were consensual. The Los Angeles Police Department investigated Hammer, but no criminal charges were brought against him.

On The Louis Theroux Podcast, Hammer said that dealing with the allegations turned into “the greatest thing that ever happened” to him. “It killed off all of the ego. It killed off all of the bulls—,” he said. “It killed off all of the pretense. I spent three years and change really having to examine myself and really having to look at myself and really having to go, ‘Whoosh,’ to all of the external validation that I was getting. Not only did it go away, it turned into global hate.”

He said that not being able to “rely on that to make [him] feel good” or “to feed [his] soul” helped him soul-search. “I needed to stop, and I needed to figure out who I was,” Hammer said. “And I needed to figure out what I was about. And basically, I spent the last couple of years taking care of my father as he died. Taking my kids to and from school every single day. Spending time with myself, alone. Learning to love myself. Now, with a sense of distance and perspective from it, it’s the greatest thing that ever happened to me.”

And Hammer once again denied all allegations of cannibalism, which he has addressed in previous interviews. “You know what you have to do to actually be a cannibal? You have to actually eat human flesh. So no,” the actor said. “Sometimes when you’re involved with a person, and you’re dating, and you guys are having sex, and you are a bit of a provocateur, and you are exacerbated by alcohol or drugs or anything like that, it’s fun to ruffle feathers and it’s fun to push the envelope little by little.”

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Hammer also addressed the release of text messages that appeared to show him engaging in violent BDSM fantasies.

“I’m not going to argue the messages,” he said. “The most important context to give these kinds of things is they are one side of a conversation. As you’ll notice, of all of the text messages that were released, the person who released them, their side was cut out of the entire conversation. It makes it look like I was just rambling to myself… Any digitally altered evidence is immediately inadmissible because you have no context. That could have been a very funny conversation between two people who were joking and pushing each other and egging each other on in the way that sometimes you see comedians pushing the boundary further and further when they’re having a conversation.”