Armie Hammer slams the industry response to Nate Parker versus Casey Affleck

Armie Hammer is ridiculously good-looking, right? I used to think that his dorky personality took away from his beauty, but nowadays, I think his personality enhances it. I think thats because Im sort of charmed by the idea that a tall, traditionally handsome, privileged guy is actually kind of messy and strange and says sh-t

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Armie Hammer is ridiculously good-looking, right? I used to think that his dorky personality took away from his beauty, but nowadays, I think his personality enhances it. I think that’s because I’m sort of charmed by the idea that a tall, traditionally handsome, privileged guy is actually kind of messy and strange and says sh-t that he shouldn’t. Armie is promoting Call Me By Your Name, which will likely garner him many nominations for Best Supporting Actor, and he might even win a few of those gongs. He covers the latest issue of The Hollywood Reporter, and he talks about his film, of course, but he also talks about what it was like to work on The Birth of a Nation, which got early Oscar buzz until Nate Parker’s rapist past came to the limelight. You can read the full article here. Some highlights:

His one-percenter background & childhood: “I definitely wasn’t like, ‘This is how everyone grows up.’ We got to live in amazing places. We had great things, toys, stuff like that. We would drive around in really nice cars — but at the same time, if we rolled down the window, my mom would be like, ‘You’re wasting air conditioning!’ ”

His childhood in the Cayman Islands:
“You can’t hide behind anonymity. You have to be nice to everybody, or else you get a reputation.” It was also where he first became acutely aware of his whiteness: “Everybody was multiracial. There was a lot of mixing. So I was always ‘the white boy.’ ”

On his viral Twitter spat with James Woods: Hammer wasn’t expecting his response to go viral; he was merely acting on impulse, irritated that Woods, who hadn’t even seen the film, “had no moral high ground to stand on and was cheapening what we did…We weren’t trying to make some salacious, predatory movie. The age of consent in Italy is 14. So, to get technical, it’s not illegal there. Whether I agree with that or not, that’s a whole ’nother Oprah, you know? Would it make me uncomfortable if I had a 17-year-old child dating someone in their mid-20s? Probably. But this isn’t a normal situation: The younger guy goes after the older guy. The dynamic is not older predator versus younger boy.”

On sexual abuse in Hollywood: “It’s been permissible for too long for people in positions of power to abuse, and for the powerless to be expected to just take it. The system seems to be shaken, and thank God.”

On the different responses to Nate Parker and Casey Affleck: The timing of the headlines “was orchestrated for sure. There was another person in the industry who had a competing film for the Academy Awards, who decided to release all of the phone records and information. I’ve been told who did it — by several people.” (Hammer refuses to say who he believes it is). He thinks the incident reveals a double standard. “Nate had the stuff in his past, which is heinous and tough to get beyond. I get that. But that was when he was 18 and now he’s in director jail. At the same time, the guy who went and won an Academy Award has three cases of sexual assault against him.”

Whether that’s a reference to Casey Affleck: “Yeah… And [Parker] had one incident — which was heinous and atrocious — but his entire life is affected in the worst possible way. And the other guy won the highest award you can get as an actor. It just doesn’t make sense, you know? Look, I’m not saying Nate should not have been in trouble. I’m saying that they got in different levels of trouble. And that’s the disparity. It’s like there are two standards for how to deal with someone who has this kind of issue in their past, you know?”

He laughed his ass off at the Oscar Best Picture debacle: “I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so hard. I literally stood up off my couch and applauded — in a schadenfreude way.”

He was just invited to join the Academy: “I always open my mouth too much, but f-ck it. I think I got accepted into the Academy largely because of the way the Birth of a Nation thing was handled.”

[From The Hollywood Reporter]

To be clear, I think Armie comes across like a rapist apologist just a tad in his defense of Nate Parker. On the other hand, he’s not wrong at all about the double-standard within the industry and the media for how Casey Affleck was handled and how Nate Parker was handled. Again, the Parker situation involved a criminal trial and the victim committed suicide. Casey Affleck was never criminally charged with anything, but he did settle out of court when the two women sued him. Nate Parker also completely and utterly bungled his response to the PR crisis, while Casey Affleck simply got all of his bros to stand up for him. There were other differences too, of course. Cough.

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Cover courtesy of THR, additional photo courtesy of Getty.

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