Depending on your definition of the word, it’s looking increasingly like Call Me By Your Name star Armie Hammer is a cannibal. Over the course of the week, a series of DMs and audio messages purported to be from the actor leaked in which he fantasizes about enslaving women, mutilating them, sticking his dick in their brain, sucking their blood and consuming their flesh. As if to underline the point, Hammer also said, “I am 100% a cannibal.”
The actor described the messages as “bullsh*t,” though his former girlfriend Courtney Vucekovich says they ring true to her. In an interview with Page Six, she stated: “He said to me he wants to break my rib and barbecue and eat it. … He says, ‘I want to take a bite out of you.’ If I had a little cut on my hand, he’d like suck it or lick it. He likes the idea of skin in his teeth.” After their relationship ended, Vucekovich began having panic attacks and entered a 30-day partial hospitalization program for PTSD and trauma.
However, not everyone is ready to believe the stories and actor and model Bella Thorne has now come out in Armie’s defense, saying:
“I honestly can’t believe this… people are crazy to fake this kinda shit this poor guy and his kids like leave him and his family alone. No way he’s a freaking cannibal.”
If you want to get down to the semantics, we don’t know if Hammer has actually consumed human flesh, though it seems he’s at minimum sucking blood and admits to cutting the heart out of a living animal and consuming it on the spot. Whether the mere desire to chow down on your girlfriends makes you a cannibal or not is up for debate, but let’s face it, even having to figure that out is not a good sign.
You could always write this off as a weird but harmless fetish, but rumbling away in the background are patterns of more prosaic and depressing physical and mental abuse of his partners that goes beyond kink. Writer Jessica Ciencin Henriquez, who dated Hammer after his divorce, commented on the messages, too, saying:
“If you are still questioning whether or not those Armie Hammer DMs are real (and they are) maybe you should start questioning why we live in a culture willing to give abusers the benefit of the doubt instead of victims. Because some of you made it to adulthood without knowing what this is. Abuse: cruel and violent treatment of a person or animal.”
It remains to be seen where this very weird story is heading next, but I think someone should probably have a peek in Armie Hammer‘s basement to check that he hasn’t gone full Jigsaw down there. In the meantime, he’s stepped away from his next major role in Shotgun Wedding to spend more time with his children. Lucky them.
