Recent comeback efforts by comedian Louis C.K. and actor Armie Hammer may be moving in different directions — but both are helping to disprove the adage that there are no second acts in American lives.
And celebrities who faced “cancellation” over bad behavior that was alleged, acknowledged — or even witnessed in real time by millions of TV viewers — can now revive their careers in record time, experts say.
“You have a society that is perpetually overstimulated and overly distracted, and their short-term memory, or collective memory, seems to be very nil at this point,” Ryan McCormick, a media relations specialist in New York City, told The Independent.
“So, somebody could have committed something pretty bad, and they’ll maybe give them another chance. Not because they’ve decided to forgive, but because the questionable incident is too far removed from recent memory.”
C.K.’s latest Netflix special premiered last month, after accusations that he masturbated in front of several women — which he promptly admitted were “true” — led the streaming platform to drop him for nearly a decade. Hammer also appeared last month in his first top-billed movie role, the controversial European thriller Citizen Vigilante, since facing a series of troubling sexual misconduct allegations in 2021.
Former Universal Pictures executive Paul Hardart told The Independent that the American public wasn’t “totally forgiving,“ as demonstrated by Maine Democrat Graham Platner’s forced withdrawal as a U.S. Senate candidate over a former girlfriend’s sexual assault allegation, which he denies.
But, Hardart said, “the news cycle is so fast now that we move on much quicker than we used to.”
“I think Donald Trump is a good example of this,” he said.
“I was listening this morning to how people are up in arms about the amount of money he’s made” since being reelected president, Hardart said, referring to Trump’s earnings of at least $2.2 billion during his first year back in the White House.
“But we’re going to move on to something else really quickly,” Hardart added.
The former film exec, now a distinguished clinical professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, also noted recent remarks by Vice President JD Vance’s, who said the Watergate scandal that forced President Richard Nixon from office in 1974 would be “like a 12-hour story” were it to happen now.
“I think maybe we’re just more forgiving because the news cycle is so fast that we can’t keep up,” Hardart said.
Stranger Things star Winona Ryder’s example highlights a contrast to the current short-memory culture, with her 2001 shoplifting arrest impacting her career for more than a decade until her triumphant return in the Netflix hit in 2016.
In a 2024 interview with UK Esquire, the 1990s “It Girl” actor recalled the “giant effect” of the scandal on her life. “There was a period when I was not in season,” she recalled, that lasted “like 10, 12, 15 years.”
But in 2022, when Oscar-winner Will Smith stunned the world by slapping comedian and actor Chris Rock live on broadcast TV at the Academy Awards ceremony, it took little more than two years before he was back on the silver screen in the fourth installment of his Bad Boys movie franchise.
That 2024 blockbuster, Bad Boys: Ride or Die, sold in excess of $193 million worth of tickets in the U.S. and almost $405 million worldwide, making it the second most successful of the series, behind the $426.5 million raked in by 2020’s Bad Boys for Life, according to the Box Office Mojo website.
Sony Pictures put the movie on pause following the slap, according to The Hollywood Reporter, but Smith and costar Martin Lawrence used a social media video to triumphantly announce it was back on track just 10 months after the incident.
“It was a cold, calculated risk assessment,” New York City-based publicist John Kwatakye-Atiko told The Independent. “Basically, the Sony global box office projections mathematically eclipsed the PR friction of the Oscar slap.”
Smith now has another leading role lined up as an FBI agent in the action thriller Supermax, with Amazon MGM Studios paying about $70 million for the rights to stream the movie worldwide, Deadline reported in May.
A Sony Pictures representative didn’t respond to an inquiry from The Independent.
California public radio host Sam Sanders drew a blunt conclusion about celebrity comebacks during an interview with The Independent.
“The entertainment industry is amoral,” said Sanders, whose weekly, pop culture-focusedThe Sam Sanders Show is broadcast by KCRW in Santa Monica.
“We think that everyone is concerned with right and wrong. Hollywood is obsessed with money and power. If you have money and you’re powerful, it doesn’t matter if you’re wrong. That is the Hollywood algorithm, the entertainment industry calculus.”
In admitting the accusations against him, C.K. said he’d convinced himself “that what I did was okay because I never showed a woman my d*** without asking first” but had since realized that he had power over the women because “they admired me.”
“And I wielded that power irresponsibly,” he wrote in 2017.
