“A lot of these waters have been settled,” Armie continued. “I think doing things like that stirs up the water again unnecessarily. It definitely wasn’t my favorite beginning. I’m glad we moved past that and got to a place where we could have a civil, normal conversation that felt good, but drudging up all that stuff; I don’t love it.”
“I hear it, and I sensed that during the chat,” Louis replied. “I think in the court of public opinion, the jury is still out.”
“But my thing now is, the court of public opinion… Pick anything the court of public opinion has an opinion on, and there’s a very good chance they will not be fully informed, there’s a very good chance they don’t have the full story, and there’s also a very good chance that they’re probably wrong,” Armie hit back. “So I don’t pander to the court of public opinion anymore.”
“I get that on things like this, that stuff needs to come up, but I’m just very happy to report that that’s not a part of my life anymore,” he concluded.
“I hear you,” Louis repeated. “It’s tough because I get that this is not a therapeutic space and you don’t owe me accountability, certainly not in the sense of your personal growth.”
“But nevertheless,” Louis went on. “Any time you do an interview with anyone, the burden of attempting to take on the narrative is that it exists in the public space now. This is what you will be going through.”
“Yeah, and I get it,” Armie replied as the interview abruptly ended.
Speaking to the audience in a voiceover recorded after the interview had been filmed, Louis acknowledged that he has “an appetite for going to places that are difficult, morally complex, or even deeply controversial.”
“The kink world has been through, historically, a lot of stigmatization,” he added, before posing the hypothetical question: “At what point does consensual abuse become something slightly more complicated?”
