When Armie Hammer started out as an actor, he was, he admits, lazy. He’d stay out late carousing and turn up at auditions totally unprepared. Then he got a wake-up call: His agent said she was firing him. Terrified of failure, he persuaded her to give him one more chance—he had three auditions that week—and knocked himself out getting ready. He landed all three parts, yet what sticks in his memory is something else: “Those were the first times I was ever nervous in an audition.” He gives a wry smile. “That feeling has never gone away. Ever.”
Worrying has clearly worked out for him. Over the last eighteen months, the 25-year-old actor has won critical kudos for two wildly different performances: the privileged Winklevoss twins (he played both) in David Fincher’s The Social Network and, more touchingly, Clyde Tolson, the frustrated love of J. Edgar Hoover’s life, in Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar. And he’s just beginning. On March 16, he’ll be seen as Prince Charming alongside Lily Collins’s Snow White and Julia Roberts’s Evil Queen in Mirror Mirror, Tarsem Singh’s cockeyed fairy tale, which Hammer calls “a visual trip.” As that comes out, he’ll be filming the title role in Gore Verbinski’s The Lone Ranger, with Johnny Depp as Tonto. All these parts play on Hammer’s most obvious quality: an aura of wholesome, almost prim virility that recalls Gary Cooper. As Collins says, “If you asked an artist to draw an all-American hero, he’d draw Armie.”
In person, Hammer is everything you expect him to be. He’s tall (six feet five), handsome, lean, intelligent, and blessed with the well-spoken graciousness befitting the scion of a distinguished family (his great-grandfather was the billionaire philanthropist Armand Hammer). Still, what strikes you first is his infectious enthusiasm. I instantly understand why Collins says she had so much fun with him on Mirror Mirror. He does impressions of Eastwood walking down the red carpet. He slips off his wedding ring to show the tiny, tattooed initials of his wife, Elizabeth Chambers, the model-actress-reporter who recently started a bakery in her hometown of San Antonio: “She’s interested in hard news,” Hammer jokes, “and cupcakes.”
Although proud of his family’s achievements, he takes equal pride in charting his own destiny. “I’m not part of any dynasty,” he says firmly. But what he shares with his forebears is an ambition unembarrassed to declare itself. “I act because I love it,” he says. “I think you can make art doing it.”
Of course, Hammer knows that there’s more to life than acting. He hopes eventually to direct—his idea of film school is working with directors like Fincher, Eastwood, and Singh. And he tells me it’s his dream to open his own cigar company (he’s been smoking them since his childhood in the Cayman Islands). If that sounds a bit quixotic, such gung-ho spirit is endearingly in character. Just ask Aaron Sorkin, who spent months with Hammer making and promoting The Social Network: “Once we began our U.S. and European press tour,” he recalls, “Armie was always the guy knocking on your hotel-room door at 1:00 a.m. saying, ‘Dude, you can’t go to sleep yet, we’re in Madrid!’ I’d remind him that we were in Berlin and had to be up at 7:00 for a press conference. But he’s an irresistible force—you’d end up going out with him anyway.”