Cancel culture calls cut on Hollywood careers … but there’s redemption for some

Armie Hammer is the latest Hollywood star to be cancelled, joining a growing cast of ousted actors. Can they ever return to the screen?

This week Armie Hammer withdrew from his starring role in the Broadway play The Minutes and completed one of the most spectacular implosions in Hollywood history.

The 34-year-old American actor, the epitome of rangy, thoroughbred glamour in Call Me By Your Name and The Social Network and heir to a multimillion-dollar industrial fortune, has been accused of violently raping a former girlfriend, who said she feared he was going to kill her, as well as abusing several other women and harbouring cannibalistic fantasies. Another former girlfriend has claimed he told her, seriously: “I want to eat your ribs.”

Hammer, who denies the allegations, had already split from his wife, the television personality Elizabeth Chambers, with whom he has two children, been jettisoned by his agent and publicist, been replaced by Dan Stevens on the TV series Gaslit and dropped out of another series, The Offer, and two films, Shotgun Wedding and Billion Dollar Spy. The great-grandson of Armand Hammer, an associate of Colonel Gaddafi, he has also made things extremely complicated for the makers of the forthcoming Death on the Nile, which he had finished shooting.

Roll call of fallen stars

“2021 is going to kneel down before me and kiss my feet because this year I’m the boss,” Hammer tweeted at the start of this year. It hasn’t worked out that way so far. He is the latest star to fall foul of cancel culture, a defining part of the modern cultural landscape.

Armie Hammer has been accused of violently raping a former girlfriend Picture: Tommaso Boddi/ Getty Images/AFP

Hammer’s accuser, known as Effie speaks about the abuse she allegedly suffered during her relationship with him during a press conference via Zoom. Picture: Courtesy Gloria Allred

In the past week alone we have seen Harvey Weinstein appeal against the 23-year sentence he received last year for rape and sexual assault, his fellow producer Scott Rudin described by a former colleague as an “absolute monster” and the novelist Philip Roth accused of the kind of misogyny and predatory sexual behaviour that would surely have had him cancelled were he alive.

Me, You, Madness, a romantic thriller to be released this month, features Ed Westwick, the British actor who has been accused by several women of rape and sexual assault, which he denies, but which led to his scenes in the Agatha Christie drama Ordeal by Innocence being reshot with another actor.

And next month The Nevers, an eagerly awaited series about Victorian women with superhuman abilities, comes to our small screens but its creator, Joss Whedon, has already jumped ship after allegations of “gross, abusive, unprofessional and completely unacceptable” behaviour on a previous film, Justice League, and the creation of a “toxic” environment on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the series that made his name.

Whedon has not responded publicly to the allegations but his name did not appear in the promotional material for The Nevers.

No shortage of abusers

Hollywood has never been short of abusers, monsters and egomaniacs but the scrutiny of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter and the speed of communication, abundance of data and febrile polarisation of the digital world make the process of being cast out much quicker and more savage. Even the Queen has jumped on the bandwagon — in the past decade she has revoked a record 70 honours, including Weinstein’s CBE.

Harvey Weinstein has appealed against the 23-year sentence he received last year for rape and sexual assault. Picture: Johannes Eisele/AFP

While cancel culture was popularised in the mid-Noughties by African-American Twitter users, ostracisation goes a bit further back — the word is derived from the ancient Greek practice of expelling grievous offenders from Athens for ten years.

Nor is there anything new about the downfall of Hollywood stars. The comedian Fatty Arbuckle’s career never fully recovered after a fatal incident involving the actress Virginia Rappe and a bottle in 1921, while a group dubbed the Hollywood Ten, including the screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, were black-listed by Joseph McCarthy in 1947 after refusing to testify about their involvement with the Communist Party.

It’s mostly men

Now, though, the threat of cancellation hangs over any star who steps or speaks out of line. We’re mainly talking about men here. Scarlett Johansson flirted with cancellation when she signed up to play a transgender role in Rub & Tug but later withdrew from the film. Gina Carano was fired from The Mandalorian after making controversial posts on social media, including one that compared America’s political divide to Nazi Germany. Generally, though, actresses are more likely to face a different type of cancellation: the type that happens when they become a mother or pass the age of 40.

Cancellation offences range from the trivial to the terrible, the fleeting to the lasting, the laughable to the deserved. It’s hard, for example, to see a way back for Weinstein, Hammer, whose marriage has also ended, or Kevin Spacey, who is being sued for sexual assault and sexual battery of a 14-year-old boy. They may not reshoot Death on the Nile with a different actor, as they did with Spacey on All the Money in the World, partly because Hammer’s role is so large. If he does feature, he will come with a ghoulish undertone.

Redemption possible for some

For many of those cancelled for lesser crimes, however, redemption is possible, even expected. If the fall from grace is mankind’s favourite career arc, the unlikely comeback is a close second. Movie stars are paid to give us drama and comedy. Should it be a surprise that they can also provide them when they are off duty?

(FILES) This file photo taken on February 26, 2017 shows nominee for Best Actor in "Manchester By The Sea" Casey Affleck arriving on the red carpet for the 89th Oscars in Hollywood, California. Scandal-hit Casey Affleck has withdrawn from presenting the best actress award at the Oscars, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the actor's publicist told AFP on January 25, 2018. Neither gave a reason for Affleck pulling out of the March 4 ceremony, but the announcement comes after renewed attention on historic accusations of sexual harassment against the 42-year-old star. / AFP PHOTO / Tommaso BODDI

As with so much else, the timescale has accelerated. While the disgraced ancient Athenian was locked outside the city walls for a decade, Casey Affleck’s exile was considerably shorter. In 2016 reports resurfaced of him sexually harassing women on the set of the 2010 film I’m Still Here, and the next year brie Larson refused to applaud him when she presented Affleck with his Oscar for Manchester by the Sea. Hammer hubristically wondered in an interview why his fellow actor was still trying to work in Hollywood.

From there, though, Affleck embarked on a process of rehabilitation that could become a blueprint. Lawsuits were settled out of court, public apologies were made (“I behaved in a way and allowed others to behave in a way that was really unprofessional. And I’m sorry.”) and he sank out of public life for a while. When he returned at the Berlin Film Festival in 2019 it was as the director, writer and star of a film that seemed ideally calibrated to his situation.

Affleck insisted that Light of My Life, in which a father protects his daughter in a post-pandemic world where women have almost been wiped out, was conceived before his scandals. Perhaps it was, but it suited his redemption story just fine.

Next month he can be seen with Sam Claflin and Michelle Monaghan in a thriller, Every Breath You Take.

Sometimes a touch of darkness fits in with a star’s brand. Christian Bale came close to being cancelled in 2008 when he made an abusive outburst against a crew member on set and was accused of assault by his mother and sister. Yet the latter charges were not brought, Bale denied wrongdoing and any bitter aftertaste was in keeping with the saturnine tone of his movies at the time — The Dark Knight, Terminator Salvation and the mob drama Public Enemies. Had he been pursuing a career in wacky rom-coms, the outcome might have been different. In 2011 he won an Oscar for another troubled role — a boxer in The Fighter — and in 2019 he was nominated again for playing Dick Cheney, not one of life’s pussycats.

Mel Gibson as Brett Ridgeman in Force of Nature. Picture: Supplied

Similarly, Mel Gibson’s drunken, antisemitic rant in 2006 doesn’t appear to have harmed his ability to play objectionable cops (Dragged Across Concrete) or bigoted grandfathers (Daddy’s Home 2). Then there is James Gunn, the director of the Guardians of the Galaxy films who was fired by Disney when there came to light old tweets in which he had joked about rape, 9/11 and paedophilia. Yet Gunn has been reinstated for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 and this year directed another superhero flick, The Suicide Squad, whose publicity (“from the beautifully terrible mind of James Gunn”) basked in his waywardness.

Even Depp could bounce back

It seems unlikely too that Johnny Depp’s career is over. Yes, he lost his libel case against The Sun for saying he had beaten his former wife Amber Heard and last month he was denied an appeal. He might have made his last big-budget movie; he will certainly no longer play the evil wizard Grindelwald in the Fantastic Beasts franchise. Yet Dior, whose Sauvage aftershave Depp advertises, has not severed its links with him — sales actually went up during his trial. He could move into music, however amusing that may be to some — that world is traditionally more accepting of bad behaviour — and an online petition to restore him to the Pirates of the Caribbean series has received 500,000 signatures. Assaulting Heard was vile but if a star is big enough and their crimes fall short of murder or rape, there can be a way.

Johnny Depp might have made his last big-budget movie, but still has support. Picture: Samir Hussein/Getty Images

Indeed, a select group of people can ride out turbulent periods or rely on wrongdoing being overlooked. That can depend on the severity of the allegations and access to astronomically expensive lawyers and publicists but it’s also about the regard in which that person is held.

Hugh Grant charmed his way out of the Divine Brown incident. While the creepy-looking Jonathan King was sent to prison for having sex with boys of 14 and 15, iconic David Bowie went unpunished after sleeping with girls of a similar age. He was too cool to fail.

Sometimes we just don’t want people to be guilty. When a court ruled in 2016 that Brad Pitt had not, as had been alleged, “got physical” with his son Maddox on a private jet, many breathed sighs of relief. Yes, Pitt was involved in a messy divorce from Angelina Jolie and attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, but those were acceptable flaws. Everyone loves Brad Pitt, right? You can’t cancel Brad.

Before we knew it he was turning his Pitt-news up to 11 in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood as Cliff Booth, a stuntman with a washboard stomach, killer threads and an array of laconic one-liners. OK, Booth may also have murdered his wife, but Pitt wasn’t given too much grief for that. By the time he won best supporting actor for the performance at the Screen Actors’ Guild awards he was laughing at himself and we were lapping it up. “Let’s be honest, it was a difficult part,” Pitt drawled in his speech. “Guy who gets high, takes his shirt off and doesn’t get on with his wife? It was a big stretch.”

Brad Pitt seems to have what are deemed “acceptable” flaws. Picture: Kevin Winter/Getty Images

Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood also featured Roman Polanski as a character and a scene in which Booth asks to see a girl’s ID before having sex with her. That appeared to be a reference to Polanski having had sex with a 13-year-old girl in 1977 at Jack Nicholson’s house in Los Angeles. Yet Polanski has never been wholly cancelled, despite facing prison if he returns to America. He has worked consistently in Europe and last year won the Cesar, France’s equivalent of the Oscars, for best director for An Officer and a Spy.

Of course, the Cesars don’t represent all of France – the actress Adele Haenel walked out of the ceremony when Polanski was announced as the winner. Yet it’s probably the case that America, the birthplace of cancel culture, is less likely to forgive bad people who happen to be great artists. Vive la difference …

The Times