As Armie Hammer becomes more famous, can he still get away with saying whatever he wants?

WASHINGTON - Armie Hammer is sitting in a hotel room, in the middle of telling a story, when his publicist coughs. Loudly. Hammer stops talking and turns to look at her. "What?" he asks, grinning innocently. "What?"

He's not sharing a particularly controversial anecdote - it's one he told before on "Conan," about how he got so worn down during the 14-month press tour for "Call Me By Your Name" that he refused to wear anything but tracksuits. But the cough may be a signal for "Armie, please stop talking." Or "Armie, please don't say anything that will make my job harder."

The need for a signal wouldn't be a surprise. Hammer, who has become a Hollywood and internet-favorite star over the last several years, has developed a reputation for having little filter, especially on social media. While it might stress out his "people," it has turned him into a subject of fascination. How often do celebrities ever say what they're really thinking, even when it gets them into trouble?

The stakes are high for Hammer, 32, steadily rising through the fame ranks with an eclectic career, from big studio pictures to indie films to biopics. Hammer is in D.C. to promote "On the Basis of Sex," released on Christmas, inspired by the true story of a young Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Felicity Jones) and her work on a groundbreaking tax case that changed how the courts viewed gender discrimination. While known as "the RGB movie," Hammer is in the co-lead role as her husband, tax attorney Martin Ginsburg; he's the one who brings Ruth the case.

Basically, it's difficult to typecast Hammer as anything except Extremely Good-Looking Guy Who Can Really Wear a Suit. During the "On the Basis of Sex" red carpet, Jones joked she even saw 85-year-old Supreme Court Justice Ginsburg's eyes "light up" when she saw Hammer.

Hammer is aware of this, and as a result, seems especially enthusiastic when he turns up in the opposite of what people might expect. He had a critically acclaimed turn as the evil boss this year in Boots Riley's dark comedy "Sorry to Bother You," and was eager to play such a shocking villain.

"There was no constraint, there was no, 'OK, you just have to be the charming, funny, handsome guy' or whatever," Hammer said. "It was like, 'Now you get to be a maniac, you can just go nuts, whatever you want to do is OK.'"

Hammer, the great-grandson of an oil tycoon, grew up in the Cayman Islands and Los Angeles, and dropped out of high school with dreams of becoming an actor. After a few TV parts - a football player on "Veronica Mars," a wealthy scammer on "Gossip Girl" - Hammer landed his breakout role in 2010 playing Mark Zuckerberg nemeses, the Winklevoss twins, in Aaron Sorkin's "The Social Network." (It led to the iconic line, "I'm 6'5", 220, and there's two of me.")

Afterward, he played everything: the prince in the Snow White retelling "Mirror Mirror"; a slave owner in "The Birth of a Nation"; FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's deputy in "J. Edgar"; a KGB spy in "The Man from U.N.C.L.E."; the graduate student who falls for the son of his Italian host family in Academy Award best picture nominee "Call Me By Your Name." Hammer said he hasn't gravitated toward wildly different parts on purpose, and it's "an illusion" that any actor has control over their career. However, he is careful about what he doesn't want to do.

"Maybe this is just a naive take on my part, but I've always felt like it's OK to say no if you don't respond to something," Hammer said. "You feel like you almost have to pay karmically for every cent that you earn if you're not really invested in the project. I can only think of maybe one time in my career where I wanted to say no and didn't, and I really didn't enjoy myself."

Hammer doesn't share which specific project - while he often says what he thinks, he doesn't go that far. But unlike some actors who claim they don't pay attention to criticism, Hammer is tuned in. He apologized in 2017 for his comments equating sexual assault charges against Nate Parker, his "Birth of a Nation" co-star, with the sexual harassment civil suits against Casey Affleck, whose "Manchester By the Sea" was a fellow awards contender. He blamed the failure of "The Lone Ranger" (the big-budget flop with Johnny Depp) on critics. And he made headlines last year for critical tweets to BuzzFeed reporter Anne Helen Petersen, who scrutinized his career in a lengthy piece titled "10 Long Years of Trying to Make Armie Hammer Happen."

After the latter dust-up, Hammer quit Twitter, but came back (it's a "wonderful news aggregation system," he said) but he's wary of the app's users.

"Twitter is largely comprised of the people who are on Yelp, who will go and have a meal and leave a one-star review, and then when you read the review, they're like, 'I asked for an extra napkin and it took them 10 minutes to bring it to me, so ONE STAR.' That's the kind of person that thrives on Twitter," Hammer said. "I've learned you just have to have healthy emotional boundaries, and whatever happens on Twitter is not real life."

These days, Hammer is trying to stay focused on what's real: He's especially proud of "On the Basis of Sex" and playing Ginsburg's spouse, whom he feels is an underrepresented type of film character: the husband who is a genuine, supportive equal partner. One of Martin's first scenes shows him holding their screaming baby daughter while Ruth gets ready, and he's frequently featured in an apron cooking dinner - not so typical for a 1950s couple. They're both at Harvard Law School, but Martin is never threatened. They're a true team, from how they raise their children to how they fight the gender discrimination case.

"I felt it was an important movie to make for the sake of the world my daughter's going to grow up in," said Hammer, who has a toddler daughter and son with his wife, TV journalist Elizabeth Chambers. "Yes, (Ginsburg) is superhuman in terms of her massive effect on the legal system and the world that we live in today. But she started just as a woman who wanted to change things and then did it by using her brain. I feel like that's the important message."

The film, written by Ginsburg's nephew Daniel Stiepleman and directed by Mimi Leder, was in the middle of shooting last fall when the Harvey Weinstein scandal broke, and the #MeToo and Time's Up movements launched. Combined with the political climate and the extreme spotlight on the Supreme Court, the movie could not feel more timely.

"You never know when you start making a movie where the zeitgeist is going to be, or what's going on in the court of public opinion," Hammer said. "I think that Mimi had her finger on that pulse and recognized that. Kudos to her and kudos to everybody else who got behind making this movie. Because I feel like it's something that, especially right now, people will identify with."

Hammer is quite familiar with the court of public opinion. He had another Twitter incident last month after the death of comics icon Stan Lee, as he critiqued the (often-mocked) trend of performative grieving on social media: "So touched by all of the celebrities posting pictures of themselves with Stan Lee. No better way to commemorate an absolute legend than putting up a picture of yourself," Hammer tweeted. After much criticism, he deleted the post and apologized: "While attempting to provide some unnecessary social commentary about the current selfie culture, I ... inadvertently offended many who were genuinely grieving the loss of a true icon."

When asked about what he learned from the incident, Hammer pauses before answering carefully. "I think that there is a wrong way to be right."

The coughing publicist cuts in before he can say anything else: "That's how we're going to end it."