Armie Hammer was just replaced in another project, an upcoming TV drama setup at Starz that also has Julia Roberts attached. This time around, however, well-publicized controversies including allegations he was into sexual cannibalism and separate allegations of sexual assault are not the reason why. In fact, Armie Hammer had left the project before any of the myriad allegations came to light just a few short months ago. Now, we’ve learned he’ll be replaced by Beauty and the Beast and Downton Abbey star Dan Stevens.
News broke today that Armie Hammer has exited an upcoming Julia Roberts and Sean Penn drama called Gaslit, which is expected to be a “modern take on Watergate” and is based on the podcast Slow Burn. In it, Hammer had been expected to take on the role of John Dean, a member of the White House Counsel dealing with conflict over whether to lie to protect the President. Dan Stevens will now occupy that role in the Starz series, per Deadline.
It’s been about two and half months since Armie Hammer dropped out of Jennifer Lopez’s upcoming movie. Shotgun Wedding (which is now shooting without him in the Dominican Republic) following allegations he allegedly was into sexual cannibalism (allegations he denied). In the time since, the news he’d left Gaslit also dropped -- though unlike Shotgun Wedding it was not directly related. The tide has not stymied either following separate reports of sexual assault and some comments from Armie Hammer’s ex-wife Elizabeth Chambers, who has publicly commented on the matter -- the couple had split last summer following a reported cheating scandal before any of these reports broke.
At the time of Hammer's exit from Gaslit he was expected to star in another project called The Offer, which is why he left the Starz series. As for The Offer, the actor has also left that project at this point, this time directly related to the allegations. Most recently Armie Hammer exited Billion Dollar Spy, a Cold War era movie that would have had him starring along with Mads Mikkelsen.
However, prior to all of this Armie Hammer had completed work on the hotly anticipated Death on the Nile, the sequel to Kenneth Branagh's Murder on the Orient Express which had been pushed back earlier due to the pandemic. It now won't come out until 2022, but it's unclear if that movie will make any changes as it's already been filmed, Hammer's in it extensively, and it's in the can and ready to roll. The movie is a Hercule Poirot project and the first did well at the box office, so pushing it to February of 2022 kind of sucks from that standpoint, but we'll have to wait and see what Disney ultimately opts to do given the current circumstances.
Meanwhile, we'll let you know if any other news breaks related to the actor, who rose to fame with The Social Network in 2010. He currently has no upcoming projects (only a couple that are completed) in the works. Of course, Gaslit is likely going to be a weird one for Dan Stevens, too, as I'm sure this whole replacement thing will be a part of the dialogue about the project moving forward. We'll keep you updated regarding that too.
