The actor admits working on the Boots Riley-directed film makes him think twice about annoying telemarketers in the future.
- Jul 13, 2018
AceShowbiz - Actor Armie Hammer sympathises with telemarketers after portraying a "lunatic" boss in his new movie Sorry to Bother You.
Get Out star Lakeith Stanfield leads the cast of the Boots Riley fantasy satire, about a laid back African-American telemarketing employee, who discovers his inner "white voice", which sets him on a path to career success and catapults him into an alternate reality.
Hammer plays Stanfield's out-of-control boss, Steve Lift, and he enjoyed letting himself go crazy for the role.
"He's a bit of a nutjob," Hammer smiled as he talked about his cocaine-snorting character.
"He's the fun, psychopathic CEO that you never want to work for and hope that doesn't actually exist in real life. He's just this megalomaniacal lunatic who runs this ginormous... telemarketing firm, and it just goes bonkers".
Armie can't remember the last time he was on the receiving end of a telemarketing call in real life, but the cheeky Call Me by Your Name star found the perfect way to annoy anonymous sales callers when he was younger.
"When I used to get telemarketing calls, I had a great plan," he told breakfast show Good Morning America. "What you do is, you talk really slowly, and you keep them on the phone as long as you can, because if you hang up on them, they don't care...
"I turn the tables on the torturer, so I start to torture them. I say, 'Hold on, hold on, hold on... let me get a pen and paper,' and then I wait about 30 seconds, and then I come back and say, 'OK, where did you say you were calling from?' and they say the name, I go, 'I'm sorry, slow down, slow down. Will you spell that really slowly...?'".
Some telemarketers used to simply hang up on him: "And then you're like, I got you!" he laughed. "Now who's wasting whose time?".
However, Armie admits working on Sorry to Bother You has made him think twice about being so devious in future.
"Now after doing this (movie), it really kinda humanises it (telemarketing)," he said. "Now I feel so badly for messing with these people. Now it's like, they were just trying to eat; they were just doing their job".
