Purported people-eater Armie Hammer just admitted to a bizarre organ-munching ritual

When it comes to teaching the next generation about celebrity public relations, the strange tale of Armie Hammer will be a key case study. Once upon a time, he was on the verge of breaking into the A-list, having even once been cast as Batman. But in January 2021 his reputation was blown to smithereens when a series of DMs and audio messages leaked in which he fantasized about enslaving women, mutilating them, and consuming their flesh.

In his own words, he said “I am 100% a cannibal,” “I want to eat you,” and claimed he’d “cut the heart out of a living animal and eaten it while still warm.” Consequences arrived swiftly. Hammer secluded himself in his Cayman Islands family home, left two in-production projects, separated from his wife, his agents ditched him, and he checked into a rehab facility.

Now, four years on, Hammer wants to revise his self-declared cannibal percentage from 100% down to 0%. Hammer recently appeared on British documentarian Louis Theroux’s Spotify podcast where he was directly asked, “Are you a cannibal?” He replied: “You know what you have to do to actually be a cannibal? You have to actually eat human flesh. So no.” When quizzed about why he claimed to be a cannibal in the first place, he insists it was all a big joke: “it [was] fun to joke about if I was stoned or drunk or like laughing as I was typing these messages.”

However, it seems there’s at least a grain of truth to his claim to have “cut the heart out of a living animal and eaten it.” Hammer underlined that it’s untrue that he’s eaten an animal’s “entire” heart, but admitted to consuming part of one as a “rite of passage”:

You take a bite out of the heart, and you’ve got all your buddies around you, they’re goading you on … it’s sort of like an almost overly charged male rite of passage when you go hunting for your first time. Everyone that I know who went hunting for their first time had to do something similar.”

Fortunately for Hammer, Hollywood loves a comeback story and he now claims he has “offers coming in every week” and that he’s just wrapped on a new movie in the U.S. This may well be The Dark Knight, which isn’t at all related to anything Batman, but does see him play a man on a “vigilante crusade.” It’s directed by Uwe Boll, which should tell you everything you need to know about its quality. But hey, there’s nowhere to go but up from here!

If there’s a moral to this story for any budding celebrities wanting to avoid a PR nightmare, it’s that maybe don’t insist that you’re a cannibal and have a voracious desire to consume human flesh. Or, if you absolutely must, at least don’t do it by text. But, for now, we will take Hammer at his word and believe that he has not, in fact, eaten anybody. That said, if we see him auditioning for a lead role in Sweeney Todd, we may reconsider our position.