Armie Hammer is reportedly not feeling good about the attention his movie comeback is getting.
The 39-year-old stars in German filmmaker Uwe Boll’s new film, Citizen Vigilante, which has been widely condemned as racist and xenophobic and even banned in some countries.
It is Hammer’s first major role in five years after he was accused of rape, sexual misconduct and cannibalism in 2021. Hammer denied all allegations.
In a new Puck News report, it is claimed that Hammer was unaware of how inflammatory the film would be.
“The first time he saw it, he was in tears,” a source in Hammer’s camp reportedly told Puck’s Kim Masters. “He called me and said, ‘F***. This is hateful, disgusting.’”
The film sees Hammer play a wealthy American businessman living in Croatia who takes justice into his own hands after becoming angry at violent crime perpetrated by immigrants.
It has become a cause célèbre among right-wing figures, with Elon Musk throwing his support behind the project by making the entire film available to watch for free on X for 48 hours.
The insider reportedly told Masters that Hammer knew the film “leaned toward the right, but Uwe works in a very frantic way. It’s not like he sent him a hundred-page script. When he saw the final product, he was, ‘That was not the movie I thought we made,’ and he freaked the f*** out.”
In an email response to The Independent, Boll vehemently contested the source’s version of events.
“Armie enjoyed the shoot and the project,” he wrote. “Armie is a great actor and I was happy to get him for the movie. I think he is happy about the success and by the way watched the film in the editing room and various times after. Thats how I see it. Everything was by the way full written – a 50 page script he got when I first approached him and then we developed a full script and shot it. He is in every scene and so the idea that he was surprised about anything is absurd. Everything what we shot was in the script.”
The Independent has contacted Hammer’s attorney for comment.
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Boll has defended the film’s controversial themes and himself, saying in an interview with The Telegraph: “I’m not a Nazi.
“Now you’re being told that if you’re a conservative about anything — social, sexual, political — that you’re a Nazi. But this is how things stand at the moment.
“If you question anything — such as the hundreds of billions being pumped into Ukraine — then you’re either a friend of Putin or a Nazi or both.”
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter last month, Hammer revealed that Citizen Vigilante was the first acting job he had been offered in five years, telling the publication he cried when the call came in.
“It was just this moment where I was like: I’m going to get to do the thing that I love more than anything — other than my children,” he said. “I would have done a f***ing cat food commercial. I just wanted to work again.”
Addressing his fall from grace, Hammer added: “I made these problems for myself. This didn’t happen to me by a fluke accident. I didn’t do what people are saying I did. But I brought very dangerous and unsafe people into my life, and I pissed off people in my life — and here we are.”
