Christopher Polk/Getty Images for The Critics’ Choice Awards (LOS ANGELES) — Armie Hammer is opening up about how the “intense situation” of quarantine played a role in he and wife Elizabeth Chambers’ separation. 

In a cover story for the latest issue of British GQ, the actor offers a candid interview about the emotional pain he’s experienced since he and Chambers announced this summer that their marriage was coming to an end after 10 years.  

Earlier this year, the couple and their two children — daughter Harper, 5, and son Ford, 3 — quarantined with his father and his wife in the Cayman Islands, where COVID-19 protection measures were so strict that even gas stations and grocery stores shut down and the family was unable to leave the apartment. 

“It was tough, man. I’d never dealt with anything like that before in my life, so I didn’t have the tools. It was just this thing that snuck up on everybody. I don’t think I handled it very well,” Hammer reflects. “I think, to be quite frank, I came very close to completely losing my mind. I just felt completely powerless.”

Being in such close quarters for an extended period of time with a combination of “big personalities,” as Hammer describes it, proved to be a breaking point for the couple, who announced their separation in July.  

“I don’t think you’ll find anyone in the world who would ever say what I’m going through is an easy thing to go through,” Hammer shares. “It’s not about whether it was your idea or not, or whether you think it’s the right idea or you don’t. Either way, a separation like this is a seriously seismic event in someone’s life.”

By Cillea Houghton 
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