Armie Hammer

Back in 2007, 19-year-old Armie Hammer was readying himself to become a movie star. No matter that his roles, at that point, were limited to quick one-episode stints on Veronica Mars and Desperate Housewives, and a part as “Lead Prefect” in an adaptation of My Friend Flicka . Hammer already had the height, the side part, and the old-fashioned good looks that would lead directors to compare him to the likes of Gary Cooper. He also comported himself the way people who have grown up with money often do: with confidence and charisma, or if you’re being less generous, like a little bit of an asshole. Hammer had just been cast in George Miller’s doomed DC Comics adaption Justice League: Mortal and was a perfect young Bruce Wayne, even if some in the press remained dubious. “Armie Hammer (his actual, SAG-registered name) will play Batman ,” the St. Petersburg Times reported . “We guess being 6-foot-5 and having a weird name makes you qualified to play the Dark Knight.” When the movie was called off, Hammer and the other stars — including Adam Brody as The Flash, DJ Cotrona as Superman , and Megan Gale as Wonder Woman — were already deep in pre-production training. Suddenly, their path to instant stardom was over. In the aftermath, the careers of those other would-be superheroes (save Common, slated to play Green Lantern, who had an established musical career of his own) failed to bear fruit; Brody, arguably the most famous at the time of casting, has all but disappeared from Hollywood. But not Hammer, whose career has evaded certain doom for nearly a decade. He’s gone on to star in failed Westerns, spy remakes, fantasies, and historical epics. His blockbusters flop; his prestige pictures fall flat. The Lone Ranger was one of Disney’s greatest summer bombs of all time . Plans to make The Man from U.N.C.L.E. into a sprawling franchise disappeared. His attempt to redirect his career with The Birth of a Nation faded from Oscar favorite to a blip on the awards season radar. Yet he and his publicity team have never given up trying to Make Armie Hammer Happen. This year, they are spinning out a publicity campaign around his role in the likely Oscar contender Call Me by Your Name that attempts to retroactively reinterpret his choices, his failures, and his career. According to this logic, it’s not that Hammer’s a bad movie star. It’s that movie stardom isn’t for Hammer: He’s too quirky to fit into the mainstream roles available to him, and so much more than the sum of his handsome parts. He might look, as Mirror Mirror director Tarsem Singh put it , like who you’d draw if you were going to draw a prince. But Singh also pinpointed his deeper appeal: “I’m not talking about a Disney Prince,” he told Details. “There are undertones.” Yet for the bulk of Hammer’s career, those undertones have been overlooked and overshadowed by the mainstream — and altogether unremarkable — Hollywood narrative around him. There are fetish undertones, like his documented affection for BDSM and ropes . Gross undertones, like his obsession with talking about how many times he got ringworm as a child. Meme-able undertones, mostly from the adorable way he dances in a now-viral clip from Call Me by Your Name . Queer undertones, like the way he talks about “falling in love” with the film’s director on set. Paired with his performance in an Oscar-bound film, these undertones, largely organically surfaced by the internet, have the potential to finally Make Armie Hammer Happen. There had been other roles before Gossip Girl (Hammer played Reverend Billy Graham in Billy: The Early Years ) but those didn’t show up in the Vanity Fair spread or the dozens of profiles and interviews that popped up in the wake of his scene-stealing turn in The Social Network. Instead, interviewers revelled in the posh details of his youth: He was born Armand, after his 90-year-grandfather; he drove around in a “pedal car” at his grandfather’s house; he lived in Dallas and, soon after, the