A Higher Calling - NYTimes.com
By LYNN HIRSCHBERG
Published: December 19, 2008
WHEN HE WAS 12 YEARS OLD, PHILIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN saw a local production of “All My Sons” near his home in Rochester, and it was, for him, one of those rare, life-altering events where, at an impressionable age, you catch a glimpse of another reality, a world that you never imagined possible.
“I literally thought, I can’t believe this exists,” Hoffman told me on a gray day in London early in the fall. He was sitting in the fifth row of the audience at Trafalgar Studios in the West End, where he was directing “Riflemind” (a play about an ’80s rock band that may or may not reunite after 20 years), dressed in long brown cargo shorts, a stretched-out polo shirt and Converse sneakers without socks. His blond hair, still damp from showering, was standing in soft peaks on his head, which gave him the look of a very intense, newly hatched chick. At times, especially when he is in or around or anywhere near a theater, Hoffman, who is 41, can seem like an eager college student — bounding from seat to stage to give direction, writing feverishly in a notebook about a feeling he wants an actor to convey, laughing at an in-joke regarding a prop that keeps disappearing — but when the conversation shifts to a discussion of his acting in movies like “Capote,” for which he deservedly won every award that’s been invented, or “Doubt,” out this month, he seems to turn inward and ages markedly. “The drama nerd comes out in me when I’m in a theater,” he explained now, as the actors rehearsed. “When I saw ‘All My Sons,’ I was changed — permanently changed — by that experience. It was like a miracle to me. But that deep kind of love comes at a price: for me, acting is torturous, and it’s torturous because you know it’s a beautiful thing. I was young once, and I said, That’s beautiful and I want that. Wanting it is easy, but trying to be great — well, that’s absolutely torturous.”
Hoffman took a gulp of coffee from a large cup that he was holding in a brown paper bag. He turned his attention to the stage, where two actors were rehearsing a sex scene. “Riflemind,” which unfolds over a weekend, is a self-conscious study in wounds: long-simmering battles are reignited and secrets are revealed. The play has a predictable middle-aged-angst narrative that is somewhat glamorized by its rock-star milieu: the drugs may be stronger, but the emotions are oddly detached. Hoffman’s fascination with “Riflemind” — he directed it in Sydney, Australia, last year and, when we met, had been in London for several weeks preparing this production — can be explained by both his commitment to theater and by the fact that the play is written by Andrew Upton, the husband of Cate Blanchett. Hoffman met Upton and Blanchett when he appeared with her in “The Talented Mr. Ripley.” “On that movie, we shot only one or two days a week,” Hoffman recalled. “Much of the time, I was in Rome with Cate and Andrew. I have a hard time having fun, but that was heaven. And I must really like Andrew — my girlfriend, who is in New York, is about to have our third child, and I am here.” Hoffman paused. “I don’t get nervous when I’m directing a play. It’s not like acting. If this fails, I wouldn’t be as upset by it.”
Hoffman jumped out of his seat and ran to the stage. He proceeded to correct the sex scene. He bent the actress back over a couch and metamorphosed into a desperate character, the former manager of the band, driven by the hope of sudden riches and his lust for the guitar player’s wife. He played just enough of the scene and, then, he switched back to being Phil, the regular guy in the baggy shorts. It was stunning. “I don’t know how he does it,” Mike Nichols, who has directed Hoffman on the stage (“The Seagull”) and in movies (“Charlie Wilson’s War”), told me later. “Again and again, he can truly become someone I’ve not seen before but can still instantly recognize. Sometimes Phil loses some weight, and he may dye his hair but, really, it’s just the same Phil, and yet, he’s never the same person from part to part. Last year, he did three films — ‘The Savages,’ ‘Charlie Wilson’s War’ and ‘Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead’ — and in each one he was a distinct and entirely different human. It’s that humanity that is so striking — when you watch Phil work, his entire constitution seems to change. He may look like Phil, but there’s something different in his eyes. And that means he’s reconstituted himself from within, willfully rearranging his molecules to become another human being.”
FROM HIS FIRST ROLES in movies like “Scent of a Woman,” in which he played a villainous prep-school student, to the lovesick Scotty J. in “Boogie Nights,” to the passionate and ornery rock critic Lester Bangs in “Almost Famous,” Hoffman has imbued all his characters with a combination of the familiar and the unique. It’s not easy; it’s the sort of acting that requires enormous range, as well as a kind of stubborn determination and a profound lack of vanity. In the theater, Hoffman finds refuge in being part of a community. Theater presents considerable difficulties — Hoffman said his most challenging role for the stage was as Jamie Tyrone in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” on Broadway (“That nearly killed me”). But when he speaks about his work in films, Hoffman’s struggles sound lonelier: his childhood dream was to be on the stage, and the fulfillment of that fantasy seems to mitigate some of the strain Hoffman experiences when he is acting.
“In my mid-20s, an actor told me, ‘Acting ain’t no puzzle,’ ” Hoffman said, after returning to his seat. “I thought: ‘Ain’t no puzzle?!?’ You must be bad!” He laughed. “You must be really bad, because it is a puzzle. Creating anything is hard. It’s a cliché thing to say, but every time you start a job, you just don’t know anything. I mean, I can break something down, but ultimately I don’t know anything when I start work on a new movie. You start stabbing out, and you make a mistake, and it’s not right, and then you try again and again. The key is you have to commit. And that’s hard because you have to find what it is you are committing to.”
For all of his struggles, Hoffman works a lot — he’s a very active co-artistic director of the LAByrinth Theater Company, a multicultural collective in New York that specializes in new American plays. LAB mounted five productions last year, thanks in large part to Hoffman’s diligent involvement with every aspect of the process, from fund-raising to directing to acting. “I’ve seen him tear tickets and seat people at LAB productions,” said John Patrick Shanley, the writer and director of “Doubt” and himself a LAB company member. In his 17-year-long career, Hoffman has also made more than 40 films, including “Doubt,” for which he has been nominated for a Golden Globe as best supporting actor, and “Synecdoche, New York,” which was also released this year. “Synecdoche,” which was written and directed by Charlie Kaufman, is a hugely ambitious film that deals with death and art and how they come to inform one another. Hoffman plays a theater director, Caden Cotard, who wins a MacArthur and uses the prize money to begin an autobiographical play so enormous that it swallows his actual life. The movie is, as Manohla Dargis wrote in her glowing review in The Times, “about . . . the search for an authentic self in an unauthentic world.” The plot may get murky and the worlds within worlds (within worlds) are often confusing, but the film lingers in your memory, largely because of Hoffman’s performance. As he grows old, disintegrates, misses romantic connections and suffers loss after loss in pursuit of his artistic vision, Hoffman remains the emotional center of the film.
“There were days when I was three different ages,” Hoffman said while the cast of “Riflemind” took a break between the first act and the second. “I’d be married, and then two hours later my family would be dead. Charlie seemed to be interested in the idea of life moving faster as you age. And the fear of missed opportunities. In life, do you ever really know if you’re missing an opportunity? No, you really don’t. And you’re never really finished either, unless the finish is dying, and you don’t really want to think about that too much.” Hoffman paused. “Synecdoche” clearly had resonance for him. Hoffman is not a carefree person; he resolutely refuses to live lightly. “Phil is hard to know,” John Patrick Shanley said. “Phil and his longtime girlfriend, Mimi [O’Donnell], came to a party at my house, and he had on three coats and a hat. I said, ‘Take off one of your coats; it’s hot in here.’ His girlfriend said, ‘He’ll maybe take it off in a half-hour.’ It’s such an obvious metaphor, but Phil has a protective cocoon that he sheds very slowly. It takes him a while to make friends with his environment. And yet you know the men he plays the minute you meet them.”
Caden Cotard seems to echo many of Hoffman’s own internal debates and anxieties. “I took ‘Synecdoche’ on because I was turning 40, and I had two kids, and I was thinking about this stuff — death and loss — all the time,” Hoffman continued. “The workload was hard, but what made it really difficult was playing a character who is trying to incorporate the inevitable pull of death into his art. Somewhere, Philip Roth writes: ‘Old age isn’t a battle; old age is a massacre.’ And Charlie, like Roth, is quite aware of the fact that we’re all going to die.” Hoffman looked around the theater. The stage manager was arranging furniture; the actors were lolling on a sofa; Andrew Upton was chatting with an assistant. “In 80 years,” Hoffman went on, “no one I’m seeing now will be alive. Hopefully, the art will remain.”
Which is, of course, the perfect reason to make great movies. A single performance on stage is ephemeral, but films can still be watched 80 years after they are created. Hoffman would never say that out loud — it would sound too grand, too self-important, too movie-starish. Still, he knows he will not be remembered for his real-life persona but rather for the characters he has chosen to embody. In “Doubt,” for instance, which was originally a play, he is a Catholic priest who may or may not have been inappropriate with a young male student. He is suspected and accused by the principal of the parish school, a nun named Sister Aloysius, played by Meryl Streep. “If I asked 10 people on the subway who I should cast for the older nun, they’d all say Meryl,” Shanley told me. “But I didn’t know what Phil would do with the part of Father Flynn, and that intrigued me. I did know that he would make Meryl sweat, that she would be up against someone of equal intelligence. Meryl is a street fighter, and she schemes as an actress — she wants to win the scene. Phil won’t play that way. He won’t engage. Before their big confrontation scene, Meryl would be muttering ‘I’m going to kick his butt’ for the entire crew to hear. She’d look at him and say, ‘I know you did it.’ And Phil would just laugh and say, ‘Meryl’s always trying to get in my head.’ ”
As usual Hoffman struggled with the character. “On every film, you’ll have nights where you wake up at 2 in the morning and think, I’m awful in this,” he recalled. “You see how delicate it is — a little movement to the right or the left, and you’re hopelessly hokey.” The film revolves around the question of the priest’s culpability, but that is not what mattered to Hoffman. Hoffman plays the priest as a reformer, a man interested in a more philosophical and tolerant approach to religion. Shanley had given Hoffman a “back story” on Father Flynn, who is based, in part, on a teacher who had a profound impact on Shanley as a boy, but Hoffman added his own interpretation. “I did research by, among other things, going to church. As a kid, I was confirmed and I went to church, but I was bored. Now, I feel the opposite: A good sermon is just like theater. It combines the political scene and the Scriptures, and I thought, Hey, I could do it like that. It’s like a teacher getting up and saying, This is the school I come from.”
Since playing the role, Hoffman has been asked repeatedly if Flynn “did it.” He won’t answer. “I wouldn’t ever say whether the priest is innocent or guilty because I saw ‘Doubt’ as being about something larger,” Hoffman said. “What’s so essential about this movie is our desire to be certain about something and say, This is what I believe is right, wrong, black, white. That’s it. To feel confident that you can wake up and live your day and be proud instead of living in what’s really true, which is the whole mess that the world is. The world is hard, and John is saying that being a human on this earth is a complicated, messy thing.” Hoffman paused again. “And I, personally, am uncomfortable with that messiness, just as I acknowledge its absolute necessity. I find the need to play a part like Father Flynn inescapable, and I only want to do things I’m that passionate about. I know there are actors out there that present themselves as cool cats, but you better take your cool-cat suit off if you want to act. You can’t otherwise.”
As he said this, Hoffman sounded more melancholy than strident. He looked up at the stage where the actors were reassembling, about to run through the entire first act. “We’re hitting the moments too much,” Hoffman said to no one in particular. What he seemed to mean is that the characterizations had little individuality, that the actors were spending too much time polishing the shiny surface of the play instead of exploring its nuances. “They have to get back to the simple act of doing something,” Hoffman said patiently. “With any character, you have to bring it back to the normal.”
But, as the director, Hoffman could only inspire them — he couldn’t jump onstage and play all the parts himself. Which may have been a relief. “During ‘Doubt,’ Phil seemed to be in a lot of pain,” Shanley remembered. “He’d smoke cigarette after cigarette and stare out the window. I was afraid to say anything to him. And now when we talk about the movie, he says how much fun he had. I’d say, ‘You looked like you were in hell.’ Phil just shrugs and sort of jokes: ‘Hell? That’s where I live.’ ”
“IT WAS PRETTY GOOD LAST NIGHT,” Hoffman said over lunch the next day at a hotel called One Aldwych, which was near the theater. “We were there until 11:30. I had to show tough support to the cast. I can’t do it for them, but I know how it goes: you open the play, and you’ll have a week that’s weird. And then you have a performance that’s really strong, and you’ll try to find that performance again, as if you’ve never done it before. Finally, you find it again, and you’re on and off for a little while, and then you reach a stretch for a couple of weeks where — wow! — you know how to do the play! And then you become stiff again. And so on. But I can’t tell them all that. They have to figure that out on their own. If I’m on them all the time, it’s never going to be theirs.”
Hoffman paused and studied the menu. He was wearing khaki pants and a windbreaker, and he was carrying a worn paperback copy of “Othello.” He will portray Iago in a new production of the play next year, directed by the avant-garde theater and opera director Peter Sellars. Othello will be played by John Ortiz, Hoffman’s friend and a founding member of LAB, which will be affiliated with the production. Often, when you connect the dots with Hoffman, you wind up at LAB.
“I’ve never been all that interested in playing Hamlet,” he said, after ordering corned beef hash and eggs. “Hamlet is a role most actors are supposed to want to play, which is probably why it’s never intrigued me that much. But Iago — I guess his demons interest me more. Iago is a military guy, and I like the idea of him being a general like Wesley Clark, who has accomplished so much in an arena where there’s death and, suddenly, he walks into a nonmilitary world, and he’s no longer the guy he thinks he deserves to be. To my mind, Iago actually loves Othello. And it’s hard not to think of Obama when you read ‘Othello’ now.” Hoffman took a sip of coffee. “It’s fun to think about the possibilities, but as always, I can’t believe I’m doing this. It seems impossible to me.”
When you sit across from him, it is difficult to imagine Hoffman playing anyone as angry and diabolical as Iago. With his pale, lightly freckled skin, blue eyes and solid build, he looks more like an avuncular scholar than a military man (or a priest or . . .). His demeanor and appearance are so fundamentally regular that it seems impossible that he has played such a vast array of anything-but-regular characters. “His physical form actually works to his advantage,” Meryl Streep told me. “Philip is not particularly any one way, which means he can be anybody at all. One of the most important keys to acting is curiosity. I am curious to the point of being nosy, and I think Philip is the same. What that means is you want to devour lives. You’re eager to put on their shoes and wear their clothes and have them become a part of you. All people contain mystery, and when you act, you want to plumb that mystery until everything is known to you.”
Hoffman’s approach may be less vampiric than Streep’s, but he is no less adept at getting beyond the merely physical embodiment of a role. He may put on his character’s shoes, but he also takes them off: in his work, Hoffman is willing to be ugly, pimpled, sexually scarred, miserably unhappy, fleshy and naked. He is never hesitant to reveal the soft underbelly — the insecurities, the (perhaps humiliating) desires, the longing. “I’m much more vain in my life than I am when I’m working,” he said as the food arrived. “I wish I looked different as Phil walking around or Phil waking up. I’m going to be 41, and I’ll go to the bathroom and get a good glimpse of myself in the mirror, and I’m like, What happened? All youth has left me for good. That fear that makes people crazy will strike me at those moments. But when I’m working, I’m grateful for the way I look. I’m grateful for the fact that I have a body with which I can do what I need to do and I can come off as . . . anybody.”
He started out as an athlete. The son of a Xerox employee (“My father did something a little spooky with computers all over the country”) and a lawyer (“My mother is crazy about my career — she goes to the festivals and comes to the play readings”), Hoffman was the second youngest of four kids. He was raised Catholic and played three sports until a neck injury during wrestling practice forced him, under doctor’s orders, to quit contact sports. “I thought, O.K., I’ll play baseball,” Hoffman said. “But I’m 14 with a neck brace. I’d see some girl from 10 blocks away, and I’d take it off until she passed me. I was this freckle-faced kid, and I perceived myself as not attractive. When the doctor asked me if I still had pain, I lied. My pact with God was that I would no longer play sports. So instead of trying out for baseball, I auditioned for a play.” Hoffman smiled. “And also there was this beautiful girl. I had a huge crush on her, and she acted. It seemed like something worth giving up baseball for.”
In 1984, when he was nearly 17, Hoffman auditioned and was chosen to attend the New York State Summer School of the Arts, a highly selective program in Saratoga Springs. “Phil stood out,” recalled Bennett Miller, who directed Hoffman in “Capote.” “We met then, along with Dan Futterman, who wrote ‘Capote.’ At the time, Phil was very popular: he won everybody over. It wasn’t really because he was a social animal. We were attracted to the fact that he was genuinely serious about what he was doing. Even then, he was passionate. Phil drank a lot of beer, and he could tell a story and light up a room. You wanted to be around him — he was like Truman Capote in that you wanted to sit at his table.”
Miller and Hoffman became great friends. When the summer ended, Hoffman stayed in touch, even flying from Rochester twice to visit Miller at his home in Westchester County. “Phil always had an exceptional interest in the outside world,” Miller said. “He wanted to go to Manhattan, to the Blue Note, to hang out in Times Square. In his high school, at 17, Phil was cast as Willie Loman in ‘Death of a Salesman.’ After the performance, he called me and said, ‘I got a standing ovation.’ One of the biggest regrets I have in life is I didn’t see Phil as Willie Loman.”
Hoffman auditioned to study theater at Syracuse University, Carnegie Mellon and N.Y.U., where Miller was also applying. They both got into N.Y.U. “Once we made a pact with another friend that if any of us ever won an Academy Award, the first person had to bark their acceptance speech like a dog,” Miller told me. “The deal was that until the producer fades you out, you have to bark instead of speaking. When Phil won for ‘Capote,’ we were hoping for at least one bark but, sadly, no.”
In 1991, when Hoffman was 24, he auditioned five times and was cast in the Al Pacino film “Scent of a Woman” as the prep-school student who betrays his classmate, the lead character. “That’s when I first noticed Phil,” Nichols said. “He summed up all the ways those boarding-school bullies were scary. There is something deeply ethical about Phil as an actor that was apparent even then — he has the integrity and commitment to represent his characters without any judgment.” At the time, Hoffman was living in Brooklyn (“with just a futon”) and working at a deli. “When I catch ‘Scent of a Woman’ on television now,” Hoffman said, “I’ll watch it, and I say, ‘Do less, Phil, less, less!’ Now, I’m a little mortified by parts of my performance. But back then, it was huge! It was pure joy to get to do the work. The director, Marty Brest, told me to never call acting a ‘job.’ Even now, I’ll catch myself calling it a job, and I get angry at myself.”
Paul Thomas Anderson also admired Hoffman’s performance in “Scent of a Woman.” “It was one of those ridiculous moments where you call someone and say, ‘You’re my favorite actor,’ ” Anderson told me recently. Anderson then wrote a part for Hoffman in “Boogie Nights” and, later, in “Magnolia” and cast him in “Punch-Drunk Love.” Those supporting roles — a repressed film-crew member in love with a porn star, a saintly hospice nurse, a menacing proprietor of a phone-sex operation — became part of Hoffman’s collection of precisely drawn, scene-stealing characters. “I remember seeing Philip in ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley,’ ” Streep told me. “He played a rich, spoiled snob, and I sat up straight in my seat and said, ‘Who is that?’ I thought to myself: My God, this actor is fearless. He’s done what we all strive for — he’s given this awful character the respect he deserves, and he’s made him fascinating.”
Hoffman’s role in “The Talented Mr. Ripley” was Freddie Miles, a close friend of the golden-boy protagonist, whom Hoffman played as a somewhat boorish, future captain of industry living in a constant state of plush pleasure. “He’s existing in a ‘just about to take the beautiful woman’s clothes off’ world,” Hoffman told me. “And he doesn’t like anything interfering with that mood.” Unlike Freddie, however, most of Hoffman’s characters have been profoundly vulnerable, often disenfranchised misfits. In Todd Solondz’s “Happiness,” he played Allen, an insecure man who masturbates while making obscene phone calls. “That wasn’t easy,” Hoffman said now. “It’s hard to sit in your boxers and jerk off in front of people for three hours. I was pretty heavy, and I was afraid that people would laugh at me. Todd said they might laugh, but they won’t laugh at you. He saw what we were working for, which was the pathos of the moment.” Hoffman paused. “Sometimes, acting is a really private thing that you do for the world.”
“AROUND 2004,” BENNETT MILLER SAID, “Phil was where Truman Capote was in his life before he wrote ‘In Cold Blood.’ He was respected by everyone, but he hadn’t fulfilled his true potential on film. And yet Phil regarded playing Capote with absolute dread. Phil told me, I’m too big and physically too different. I said: ‘That’s not what this movie is about. Who cares if Capote was short and you’re not — that’s not the point.’ I knew that Phil, like Capote, had the charm, the ambition and the talent to both be great and self-destructive. I told Phil to lose weight and the rest would be my problem. And then he showed up, and I thought: What did I promise? He’s 5-foot-10 and 230 pounds? What have I done?”
Capote was a dramatic departure for Hoffman. Not only is he in nearly every frame of the movie, but the man was entirely contradictory — he was charismatic but an outsider; always watchful but loved a party; inordinately talented but competitive to a fault. Capote was seductive, manipulative, insecure, dishonest and ruthless. It intrigued Hoffman that Capote was very successful but a bit lost and, like him, wasn’t sure which path to take. Strangely, “Capote” was Hoffman’s “In Cold Blood,” the project that changed everything.
“I knew that it would be great, but I still took the role kicking and screaming,” Hoffman said now, as he ordered sticky pudding for desert. “Playing Capote took a lot of concentration. I prepared for four and a half months. I read and listened to his voice and watched videos of him on TV. Sometimes being an actor is like being some kind of detective where you’re on the search for a secret that will unlock the character. With Capote, the part required me to be a little unbalanced, and that wasn’t really good for my mental health. It was also a technically difficult part. Because I was holding my body in a way it doesn’t want to be held and because I was speaking in a voice that my vocal cords did not want to do, I had to stay in character all day. Otherwise, I would give my body the chance to bail on me.”
There was nothing easy about the shoot. Winnipeg, Canada, doubled for Kansas, and it was freezing; money was short and Hoffman’s company, Cooperstown, was a producer of the movie. “That may have been crazy to take on,” Hoffman said, “but as much as I hated spending Sundays — which was my day off — attending production meetings, it took me away from the obsession of acting the part. Putting that obsession somewhere else is rejuvenating.”
By the end, all the relationships were strained. “It was a very happy thing to have something that you suffered over be embraced,” Miller said. “A few weeks before the Oscars, we were at the Berlin film festival, and we were completely fatigued and longing for the finish line. Phil said, ‘I’m going to go in the theater and watch the end of the movie.’ He came out afterward, and his face was wet with tears. ‘Poor bastard,’ he said. Phil, at that moment, was just an audience member. He wasn’t Capote anymore.”
THREE MONTHS AFTER HOFFMAN returned from London, on a freezing Friday night in early December, he was standing in front of the Public Theater in the East Village of Manhattan smoking a cigarette. He was there to see an early staging — “it’s only the third time all these words have been said in a row,” Hoffman told me — of “Philip Roth in Khartoum,” a new play by David Bar Katz that LAByrinth is producing. LAB has a long-standing relationship with the Public Theater, which often makes its auditoriums available to the company. Hoffman, wearing a baseball hat and bundled in a heavy twill jacket that looked as if it was designed with farming in mind, cradled a pair of large headphones around his neck. “I’m playing a character who always listens to headphones,” Hoffman explained. “So tonight I thought, I’ll use them — I’ll be that guy who always has headphones on. And I put on the Cat Stevens song, ‘Trouble.’ You know, ‘Trouble set me free.’ What a great song! I had forgotten. A lot of times, a song will let you down halfway through, but that song is great to the very end.”
The part Hoffman was rehearsing on his way to meet me was a part he hoped never to play: one of the lead roles in a screen adaptation of “Jack Goes Boating,” a play about four pot-smoking friends and their quest for love, which was first staged at LAB in 2007 and which he plans to direct as a film next year. In London, he had been adamant about not wanting to direct himself. But none of the actors he hoped to cast were available, and the shoot had already been scheduled for February.
“I’m in denial about this,” Hoffman said as he finished his cigarette. “Complete denial. I have no idea about what I’m doing. I was in the play, but I don’t remember what I did. That was a year and a half ago, and even then, I was kind of unsure about the character. But if I don’t direct the movie now, I’m not going to do it, and it’s an extension of the theater company. And that’s why I got into this whole acting thing to begin with — to be part of a theater company, to do new plays. Making this movie is about being loyal to that somehow.”
Hoffman’s loyalty to work keeps him very busy: in September, “Riflemind” opened in London to stinging reviews (The Independent called it “mortifyingly bad”; The Sunday Times chided, “nearly three grueling hours of stifling your yawns”), even if Hoffman’s direction was noted with less vitriol. He then returned to New York, where he lives downtown with Mimi O’Donnell and their son, Cooper, and daughter, Tallulah, in time for the birth of their third child — a girl named Willa — in late October. “It’s three kids now and I’m very tired,” Hoffman said. “I’m a little lost in my brain.” He has a movie coming out next spring, “The Boat That Rocked,” in which he plays a D.J., and he lent his voice to “Mary and Max,” which has just been chosen to open the Sundance Film Festival. In November, Hoffman found two weeks to do a workshop of “Othello” with Sellars, before it is performed in Vienna and perhaps New York next fall. He made a trip to Austin, Tex., in search of funds for LAB, and he flew to Los Angeles to promote “Doubt” for a few days. In the last week, after screenings of the film for Academy Award voters, he had three question-and-answer sessions with the cast and director of “Doubt”; he attended the Gotham Independent Film Awards, which were held at Cipriani on Wall Street, where “Synecdoche, New York” shared the prize for “Best Ensemble” with “Vicky Cristina Barcelona”; and he looked at photographs of pools for scenes in his new film, talked to cinematographers and imagined the movie he would soon direct. “It’s a lot,” Hoffman said, as David Bar Katz, the author of “Philip Roth in Khartoum,” bounded over to greet him.
Hoffman has always been attracted to the idea of an artistic community, particularly in the theater, which is part of why he is so attached to LAB. He met Mimi, a costume designer who has recently begun directing, at LAB (“I hired her,” Hoffman joked), and the company members are some of his closest friends. When he began his film career, he worked in a similar way, joining what you might call the Paul Thomas Anderson repertory company, which included John C. Reilly and Julianne Moore, among others. Hoffman appeared in all of Anderson’s movies until last year’s “There Will Be Blood.” The members of that group have gone on to have big careers independently, and the work they do is no longer as collective. “We had a ball then,” he said in London. “It was everyone at the right time. It was very strange not to be in ‘There Will Be Blood.’ Paul kept asking me to come to Texas where they were filming and hang out. I said I’d come, but I wanted to dress in period costume and throw stones at the oil well. I wanted the audience to say, ‘Who’s that guy chucking stones at the well?’ ”
While movies typically require an elaborate and expensive mechanism, plays can be relatively simple to produce. Every year, LAB has a two-week “summer intensive” workshop during which 35 to 40 plays are rehearsed and read. Company members — there are about 100 — offer their critiques and the artistic directors then select the 10 or 15 plays they would like to see go to the next step. “Most of us liked ‘Philip Roth in Khartoum,’ ” Hoffman said. “Some of the women had problems with it, but I asked my mother to come to a reading, and she thought the female characters rang true.” Hoffman lit another cigarette. “People only want to invest in a play that they think will do well. They are not interested in risky theater. But even more traditional theater is pure risk, which is what I love about it. You roll the dice for the thrill of rolling the dice.”
As we spoke outside the Public, Katz, clearly excited and nervous about that night’s performance, leaped into view again. Hoffman stamped out his cigarette and gave him a bear hug. Katz, who was wearing a complicated gray overcoat that looked a little more Hollywood screenwriter than downtown playwright, has worked extensively with John Leguizamo and has some of his frenetic energy. He clearly saw this production as a big opportunity; Stephen Adly Guirgis’s play, “Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train,” directed by Hoffman in 2000, cemented LAB’s reputation as a theater company committed to significant new voices. “I used to think I was Catholic until I met Stephen,” Hoffman joked. “But I am not Catholic the way he is. He is tortured and haunted by that religion, and you see it in his work.”
We headed inside, veering left toward a room that had been outfitted with a hundred seats on four-tier bleachers. The stage was not raised, and there wasn’t much of a set — just some nondescript tables, stools and couches. The room was very wide, and it was hard to tell where the set stopped — often the characters appeared to be offstage when they weren’t: it was meant to evoke a TriBeCa loft that never ends.
“Philip Roth in Khartoum,” like most LAB plays, is designed to be something of a commentary on our times. “It’s about a dinner party that goes bad,” Hoffman said quietly as we took our seats in the top row. The play began with four men discussing their wives’ lack of carnal interest in them. The dialogue was funny and a little sad, but the characters were indistinct — somewhat stereotypical aging yuppies who longed for the days of easy sex. When the action moved to their spouses, the play became more engaging. But as the conflicts emerged — a severely autistic child, a wife with a more successful career than her husband’s, an interracial marriage — the play, which was two and a half hours long, began to verge on soap opera.
Hoffman seemed to love it. His attention was entirely focused, a perfect audience of one. At moments like this, it is easy to forget that Hoffman is a major movie star with an Oscar on his mantel. He appears not to have a trace of ego. “That’s why I wrote the character of the saintly nurse Phil Parma in ‘Magnolia’ for Phil,” said Paul Thomas Anderson. “Phil is that good — he’s committed to art and not in a phony, grandstanding way. He really wants to live a life in the arts that means something.” There are few other Academy Award-winning actors who have devoted themselves to the full-time running of a theater company. “It sounds noble, but it’s really not,” Hoffman said. “I do this because it gives me a home, a place where I can come and work. The movies are great, but they require a different kind of concentration, and then they’re over. Theater was my first love, and it’s been the biggest influence on my life. The theater is why I got into acting and why I’m still in acting.”
When the audience cleared out, Hoffman went backstage to talk to the actors about the performance. It felt strangely like a moment from a simpler time and place: Hoffman and his buddies putting on a show. Later that night, Hoffman would walk home in the cold listening to “Trouble” over and over on his headphones, imagining his soon-to-be-played character projected onto the big screen, but right now he was like an enthralled kid. “I’m happy here,” he said, sounding surprised at his glee. “You never forget your first love.”
“SOMETIMES WHEN I SEE a great movie or a great play I think, Being human means you’re really alone,” Hoffman told me on another cold winter night. We had just seen “Gran Torino,” the new Clint Eastwood film in which he directs himself. Eastwood plays a racist, cantankerous curmudgeon named Walt Kowalski who befriends the Hmong boy who lives next door. Kowalski is a symbol of a dying America — blue collar, militaristic, practical, afraid, proud. There’s a stylistic link between “Doubt” and “Gran Torino” — both films are rich in character and take place in a time of change. “Doubt” is set in 1964, before the upheaval of the late ’60s, and there is only one black student at the parish school in the Bronx. Similarly, “Gran Torino” depicts the last breaths of a certain kind of man: Kowalski is a former autoworker who lives his life according to strict beliefs and rules. Both films begin and end in the Catholic Church; both suggest an uncertain future. “And they are both filled with regret,” Hoffman said. We were having some pasta at an Italian restaurant near the movie theater where we had seen “Gran Torino.” “So many things I’m interested in come down to the subject of regret,” he continued as he ate his spaghetti. “That’s Capote alone on the plane at the end of ‘Capote,’ the priest and the nun in “Doubt” who make judgments they may wish they hadn’t and Clint Eastwood tonight. I try to live my life in such a way that I don’t have profound regrets. That’s probably why I work so much. I don’t want to feel I missed something important.”
Hoffman fell silent. “Gran Torino” is emotional, and he was clearly affected by the film. “I still get wide-eyed,” he said. “It’s true that I’ve made a lot of movies, and I know there’s a microphone over there and a camera back there, but when you see something great, you lose all that. I’m sitting forward, and I’m being moved, and I have no idea how he did it. I don’t know Clint Eastwood, but what’s amazing is that you have the sense that he’s doing exactly what he wants to be doing. He’s so committed. In this film, he keeps the action going, and the people don’t ever behave against their true nature. That’s what I look for in my work: when a writer can deftly describe the human experience in a way that you didn’t think could even be put into words. That doesn’t happen often, but it gives me something to play inside. Too much of the time our culture fears subtlety. They really want to make sure you get it. And when subtlety is lost, I get upset.”
When Hoffman talks about his need for emotional nuance, it’s easy to understand why he gravitates to the theater, where the great roles combine magnificent writing with intense feeling. “I’m sure Phil will do the great plays of O’Neill and Miller,” Nichols told me, “because he’s like a lion — he needs meat to feed on. And, God willing, he’ll do great movies. But those parts are harder to find in film. Movies, for me, need to be reborn. They can’t rely on the classics the way theater can.”
Hopefully, Hoffman will not give up his film career. “I heard that Eastwood is saying that this will be his last film as an actor,” Hoffman said. “There’s part of me that feels that way during almost every movie. On ‘Synecdoche,’ I paid a price. I went to the office and punched my card in, and I thought about a lot of things, and some of them involved losing myself. You try to be artful for the film, but it’s hard. I’d finish a scene, walk right off the set, go in the bathroom, close the door and just take some breaths to regain my composure. In the end, I’m grateful to feel something so deeply, and I’m also grateful that it’s over.” He smiled. “And that’s my life.”
Lynn Hirschberg is editor at large for the magazine.
