Armie Hammer says he wanted to be a drama teacher in the Cayman Islands, but the self-governing British (overseas) territory “refuses” to give him a work permit, he told Bill Maher. The government also wouldn’t give him a work permit to be a landscaper or a building manager.
The disgraced actor, who was accused of rape but ultimately cleared following a two-and-a-half-year investigation by the LAPD, guested Sunday on Maher’s “Club Random” podcast. The conversation was as random as the title suggests.
“I applied for a job to be a drama teacher. I applied for a job to be a landscaper. I applied for a job to be a building manager,” Hammer said at one point. “And the Cayman Islands refuses to give me work permits.”
Hammer told Maher that he’s basically broke and that he does not share in his family’s fortune. (“It’s so complicated,” Hammer said; his great-grandfather, Armand Hammer, struck it big in the oil business.)
“I have come to the place where I understand that there are no free lunches. And anything that you take always has strings, especially from people who love to give because then they know they’ve got strings, right?” Hammer said. “I would rather go get a job selling timeshares. I’d rather go get a job.”
Hammer literally sold timeshares for a while — and he says he loved it.
The actor continued, “Is there a world in which I could just say ‘Fuck it’ and figure out how to borrow money from family or do anything like that? Yeah. But that’s just not who I am. That’s now what I want to do. That has never been who I wanted to be. When I was 19 years old, I decided I was going to be an actor.”
Well, he’s not that anymore.
Though cleared legally, Hammer certainly has not been cleared professionally. The stain of the sexual assault accusation and publicly aired sexts essentially made him persona non grata in Hollywood. Later on the Maher podcast, Hammer spoke further about his dismissal from Hollywood and what he’s working on next.
“If somebody looks at any behavior and goes ‘I don’t like that,’ that’s OK,” he said. “By the way, all of my gay friends were like, ‘Honey, I saw your text messages. That’s it?!’ They go, ‘Oh my god, if people hacked into Grindr and put Grindr chats public, none of us would have jobs anymore.’”
Watch the Maher conversation here:
Hammer plans to make a comeback on his own terms. As he previously said during the “Painful Lessons” podcast, Hammer is writing a screenplay based on his life since his acting career is “nowhere now.”
“Even though I’m not welcome in their sandbox [of Hollywood], I just decided I’m going to make my own sandbox. If you won’t let me play in yours, I’ll go play in mine. I’ve written a script with my buddy Jerry,” he said. “We’re in the middle of trying to put that project together. I don’t want to go into the details of it right now, but we have a script, and it’s something that we’re passionate about, and it’s something that I’m going to go do. I don’t know what the future of that is going to look like. I don’t know what the response of that is going to be, but those are things out of my control. I’m powerless over what people’s response to it is going to be, essentially. But I can go do something that I’m passionate about. Just because they tell me I can’t do it doesn’t mean that I have to listen.”
The script “mirrors [Hammer’s] life,” according to the podcast host, with Hammer adding that the screenplay has been “incredibly cathartic.”
“We took an original piece of source material that was then turned into a film that we looked at and said, ‘There’s a lot of parallels here, albeit some more subtle and some more overt.’ So we took that and made it much more autobiographical and adapted it so it would be something that is cathartic,” he said. “I’ve got to say, working on a script and writing was just as fulfilling in terms of using creative muscles as being on a set, and in some ways, more. This is ours. We can do whatever the fuck we want. We’re really proud of it.”
