Armie Hammer stopped by The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon June 25 to talk about making his Broadway debut in Second Stage’s upcoming production of Young Jean Lee's Straight White Men.
Hammer earned acclaim earlier this year starring as Oliver in Call Me By Your Name opposite Timotheé Chalamet, but he says he’s now flexing a new muscle working onstage. “Doing the play is totally different than doing a movie. It's a totally different muscle,” he said. “In a movie, you have to memorize five pages a day—which is doable. We have to have a 120 pages of dialogue memorized and once you start you don't stop until it's over.”
While the production marks Hammer’s first time on Broadway, he notes he has dabbled in theatre before: “I did play Rooster Hannigan in Annie in sixth grade. Might have been the peak of my career,” he joked. “I can sing at least two bars of ‘Easy Street’ and that's all I remember.”
Hammer stars alongside Josh Charles, Paul Schneider, Denis Arndt, Ty Defoe, and Kate Bornstein in the Anna D. Shapiro-helmed staging. “I play the younger brother in the play,” said Hammer. “It's a story about a family. It's a dad and his three kids who are home for the holidays. It's watching straight white men deal with when one of the straight white men stops acting like what society really expects straight white men to act like.”
Performances begin June 29 at the Hayes Theater.
