House of Hammer unpacks the actor’s dark sexual history.
An explosive new documentary series is set to pull back the curtain on actor Armie Hammer’s abusive behavior — and that of his entire wealthy and powerful family.
The show, House of Hammer, will premiere Sept. 2 on Discovery+, and a new trailer that dropped this week gives an unsettling preview of how the project will unpack Hammer’s controversial sexual proclivities, the way they affected the women with whom he was intimate, and how they all fit into the larger story of the influential Hammer clan.
Hammer is the great-grandson of Armand Hammer, an oil tycoon who ran the Occidental Petroleum Corporation from 1957 until his death in 1990. The business created massive wealth for the entire family, but Armie Hammer sought to blaze his own trail as a Hollywood star.
His career began to gain traction when he played the Winklevoss (aka “Winkelvi”) twins in The Social Network, the 2010 dramatization of the early days of Facebook. He later had parts in big-budget flicks like The Lone Ranger and The Man from U.N.C.L.E., most of which found middling success at best, but Hammer’s pedigree kept him on the path to some version of movie stardom, hitting a peak with the critically acclaimed 2017 film Call Me by Your Name, which was nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars.
Then things took a very dark turn. Reports circulated online that women who’d had relationships with Hammer were traumatized by his fetishes for sexual violence, including an interest in extreme BDSM, emotional control, and even fantasizing about feasting on other people.
“I am 100% a cannibal,” Hammer wrote to one woman in a text message. “I want to eat you.”
The trailer for House of Hammer also includes audio recordings that Hammer sent to some of his partners. In one of them, tells one woman he’s interested in showing up to her home and “completely tying you up and incapacitating you, and then being able to do whatever I wanted to … until I was done with you.”
The stories of the women featured in the documentary describe aggressive and angry behavior that left them feeling like the sexual interactions became more severe than they had expected.
“The ropes were around your neck, your wrists, your ankles, and you’re completely immobilized. And I’m just closing my eyes until it ended,” Courtney Vucekovich, one of the women interviewed for the documentary, says through tears.
But the series expands its scope to the rest of the Hammer family, which has a long and complicated history. A feature published by Vanity Fair in March 2021 chronicled the allegations against Armie Hammer and put them into the context of other relatives, including his father Michael Armand Hammer, who reportedly kept a “sex throne” (also called a “naughty chair”) at the headquarters of the Armand Hammer Foundation.
Michael’s sister (who is Armie’s aunt) participated in the Discovery+ documentary, and the soundbites in the trailer preview a no-holds-barred approach: “My name is Casey Hammer,” she says, “and I’m about to reveal the dark, twisted secrets of the Hammer family.”
The controversies surrounding Armie Hammer have already had serious ramifications on his life and career. His wife, Elizabeth Chambers, with whom he shares two children, filed for divorce in 2020. In January 2021, Hammer departed high-profile projects, including a series about the making of The Godfather and a romantic comedy starring Jennifer Lopez, and that summer he was dropped as a client by his agent and publicist.
Most recently, it was widely reported last month that Hammer is now making money by selling timeshares in the Cayman Islands. And, in a twist of fate that we’re assuming no one intentionally planned, on the same day the House of Hammer trailer was released, a preview of another notable film hit the Internet: the teaser for Bones & All, which reunites Hammer’s former Call Me by Your Name colleagues Timothée Chalamet and Luca Guadagnino and is being described as — you can’t make this stuff up — a “cannibal love story.”
