Armie Hammer is forever grateful for the first film opportunity he received after his alleged sexual abuse scandal.
“I’m pretty sure I cried,” Hammer, 39, told The Hollywood Reporter in an interview published on Tuesday, June 16, while recalling the offer to star in the Uwe Boll-directed film Citizen Vigilante, out in select theaters and on digital on Friday, June 19. “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.”
The actor continued, “I would have done a f***ing cat food commercial. I just wanted to work again.”
The call from German filmmaker Boll, 60, came approximately five years after Hammer’s career fell apart following allegations from multiple women of sexual, emotional and physical abuse. He was accused in 2021 of sending text messages to various women containing sexual fantasies of rape, mutilation and cannibalism. Hammer was also accused of raping a woman in 2017, but he denied all allegations made against him.
The Los Angeles Police Department declined to file charges against the actor due to insufficient evidence after their 2023 investigation.
Hammer — who shares daughter Harper, 11, and son Ford, 9, with ex-wife Elizabeth Chambers — left Hollywood following the scandal and relocated to the Cayman Islands, where he worked in real estate. He later returned to Los Angeles in 2024 and received Boll’s call a year and a half later.
Hammer told THR that he initially feared he had forgotten how to act in his roughly five years away from the industry.
“I was scared s***less until the moment Uwe said action for the first time,” he said. “And then I was like — ‘Wait. I do know how to do this.’ There’s a reason I had the success I had.”
Citizen Vigilante is an action thriller that stars Hammer as Sanders, a vigilante who targets criminals and corrupt officials while evading an Interpol chief (Costas Mandylor) who sees him as a threat to society. Like many of Boll’s films, the project is low-budget and had only 50 script pages, according to Hammer.
“I was like, ‘Where’s the rest?’” Hammer recalled of receiving the script. “[Boll said,] ‘No, no, no! Ve just go and shoot and have fun. Ve vant you to be great!’ I was like, ‘Well, OK?’”
Bolle exclusively told Us Weekly in February that Hammer still has star quality despite his controversial past.
“I’ve worked with some big actors like Ben Kingsley, and Oscar-winning actors like J.K. Simmons, but they don’t have that star thing where you dominate the screen, like a Tom Cruise. [Armie] can do this,” the director shared, adding that Hammer was a team player. “I felt like after four years, it was time to give him another chance. He’s a great actor, he’s so talented, and it was so much fun to work with him.”
Since filming Citizen Vigilante, Hammer has done three other low-budget projects: the Western film Frontier Crucible, the thriller Night Driver and a yet-to-be announced film in Bulgaria.
“Lately, they always say on the first day of set, ‘We can’t believe we actually got you to do this,’” he told THR. “And I’m like: ‘My schedule was pretty open.’”
