Armie Hammer comes from a long line of entrepreneurs.
When he appeared on The Late Late Show Thursday, fellow guest Rob Delaney revealed he and Hammer share a common bond. "I would steal Playboy and Penthouse magazines," the Catastrophe actor recalled. "Then I would bring them into school and sell them to my friends." Hammer did that, too—but as James Corden pointed out, he "took it one step further."
"Oh, God. My wife is going to kill me," Hammer said. "Basically, we would have the Playboy magazines you'd buy. You know those little hotel lotions—the small, individual size lotions?"
"You would sell pornographic magazines and a small bottle lotion to boys at your school?" an incredulous Corden asked. Hammer laughed at the memory, admitting, "It sounds so much worse when you say it out loud! But in my head it wasn't that bad; I was just an entrepreneur."
Fellow guest Anne Hathaway put her head in her hands as Hammer told the story.
Corden told the actor, "It's worse when you're seeing it actually happen, I'd imagine."
"No!" Hammer replied, misunderstanding what the host meant. "I would never watch!"
"I just meant the transaction," Corden clarified. "I didn't even mean the act."
Hammer said his "business really never took off" after a classmate ratted him out. "One of first people we sold to was a guy named Dan—and I'm not going to say his last name, but you know who you are," the Free Fire star said, looking directly into the camera. "I literally was like, 'Hey, man. I've got this thing, this magazine, if you want to buy it.' After lunch, somehow I get called into the principal's office and they're like, 'We hear that you're selling Playboy magazines.' And I was like, 'I have no idea what you're talking about.' And they're like, 'No, no. We heard this and we want to go look in your locker right now.' And I was like, 'Fine! Let's go look in my locker.'"
"What they didn't know is that I had a weird feeling something like this would happen," he said. "I stuffed them in a bunch of plastics bags and tied them up and stuffed them in the bushes in front of the McDonald's that was right by our school on Santa Monica Boulevard. They opened my locker and there's obviously no Playboys in there, but there was a bunch of little cans of lotion. They're like, 'What's the lotion for?' I was like, 'I get dry hands—thank you very much.'"