It sounds silly to say it about our generation’s great master of broken old oafs, of potbellied melancholy, of eternally hungover 42-year-olds who seem to have just trudged in with some real bad news, but when I think now of Philip Seymour Hoffman I have an athletic man in mind.
He was always on the verge of something, is what I’m saying; he had an athletic vigor, always fully loaded, some volcanic incredulousness that would come leaping out of him the way a mid-major basketball coach might argue a missed foul call. He let all those bullshits and motherfuckers loose from way back behind his molars—god, what a sound! All that life.
I’m thinking about him playing craps in Hard Eight, staring down a veteran gambler (Philip Baker Hall) who is daring him to match a wild bet, and now Hoffman is lighting a cigarette, never breaking eye contact, never shutting up, chucking the dice like a tobacco-soaked relief pitcher who’d just come galloping out of the bullpen.
Or Lancaster Dodd in The Master, going absolutely mental off paint thinner moonshine, singing sea shanties and prancing around a living room like a running back waiting for a hole to open.
That was the way he worked. He was, despite playing so many lonely soldiers of middle age, a man of bottomless appetite, always going for it, always looking for more. In 2012 he described a take he and Joaquin Phoenix did for the jail cell scene in The Master as being “like two animals smelling each other,” and while he was on stage telling the story he snorted in big full nostrils of auditorium air.
When Hoffman is 12 years old, living near Rochester, New York, he sees Arthur Miller’s All My Sons and it blows his mind. It’s a moral tragedy about a businessman who sells junk airplane parts to the Air Force during World War 2; 21 men die in a crash and he makes his partner take the fall for it. “I literally thought, I can’t believe this exists,” Hoffman will later say of the play. But at the time acting is some distant planet; he’s a jock, he wrestles, plays baseball, a little football. His parents split up and after that he doesn’t see his father much, not some awful thing, he just lived somewhere else; he worked for the Xerox Company during the Cold War, “doing something a little spooky with computers all over the country,” in the son’s telling. When Hoffman’s 14 he destroys his neck on the school wrestling team. The doctor tells him he can never play sports again, and by the time he’s a senior in 1984 he is playing Willy Loman and no one can believe how good he is. He and some friends get into NYU, he drinks a million beers and he’s been stoned to oblivion on you-fucking-name-it, into rehab and out and sober again by the time he’s 22. “It was anything I could get my hands on. Yeah. Yeah. I liked it all." He says that to 60 Minutes in 2008. “I got panicked for my life. It really was just that."
In the beginning he’s taking small roles, these sort of rowdy Boys of Conflict with just a few scenes whom he nonetheless spins into genuinely pathetic fuck-ups and half-tragic weirdos. At 24 he’s living in Brooklyn, sleeping on a futon and working shifts in a deli, reading Pat Conroy novels on the bus ride to upstate New York to shoot his scenes for Scent of a Woman. He plays a prep school kid with the chub of indulgence and entitlement, but Hoffman gives him this real haunt of fraudulence, too. In Boogie Nights he plays Scotty, aching for Dirk Diggler with so much crippling, feral need. In The Talented Mr. Ripley he’s an Ivy Leaguer with pure nastiness in his heart who comes dancing out of a convertible like a showgirl.
He gets older, heavier, a gut that bends him into the posture of middle age, and now he is playing demolished husbands, sad sacks, great bellowing boors, unshaven misfits with an eminent divorcedness about them. He plays a Manhattan accountant in a Sidney Lumet movie who has a sex worker stick heroin in his arm with the cold procedure of an annual physical. He plays a flattened high school teacher in a Spike Lee movie content always to run third place to his two cooler friends. These kinds of guys are all familiar tunes, but there is something so pure and sad about the way he plays them, some futility, this gruesome fracture in the heart like an old circus elephant.
A writer remembered seeing Hoffman once at an afterparty on the rooftop of The Standard; he was just standing over in the corner by himself, taking a picture of the skyline on his phone.
“Our jobs as actors is to defend everyone we play,” he once said. “In order to defend somebody you have to show the worst side of them. It’s kind of impossible to gain real empathy without actually showing the awkward ugly uncomfortable thing.” I like to think about it like that—some unifying pain in each of us, raggedy in its own ways but all coming from a similar source. That even the pricks and assholes might have once asked themselves some hard questions and not liked the answers. There we are, grasping at purpose, coming from somewhere, rocked by something.
When that hefty craps roll goes bust in Hard Eight there’s this brief sinking look in his eyes, a candle blown out. The scene is just a few minutes long and irrelevant to the plot, but that is part of his genius: Every character is so crammed with raw gesture, a braggart who can be made the naked baby in the room just like that. It’s the rattle in the voice in a forgettable movie about a violinist who can only glimpse glory from a distance.
All of it looks like such heavy work; there is something that feels dangerous about it almost, always living at the edge, always out of breath, living with that noisy radio of human compulsion in you all the time.
Even his hair becomes an instrument he uses to explain some catastrophe. Receding and in ridiculous denial, a man holding onto his own personal Alamo up there; receding and dominated by it into a tidy part; shaggy and too sad to care. He plays brothers and sons and men with surrogate fathers, injured little rescue pups and big barking Rottweilers. He is the kind of guy who can play both the sleaze who owns a mattress dealership and the gullible bastard who might end up getting sold a heap of junk from one. Had he been born in a different time he might have played one of the great movie detectives of the 1970s.
And even all those years after getting clean he can still play a drunk with strange precision. "It was pretty bad, you know what I mean?” he said of his college days. “And I know, deep down, I still look at the idea of drinking with the same ferocity that I did back then.” He knows how to play drunk’s volumes and its wallows, its incoherences and its sloppiness, how to take all those slovenly gulps, and here is the thing, he knows how to play its tender shames, too, that moment after the thrill of a Drunk Epiphany is gone and you are left only with its embarrassing grandiosity, the next morning coming on like a train. You know what I mean?
In 2005 he wins the Academy Award for Best Actor. He has a partner, three children, money and a bigger place now. And the entire time he is doing theater, too: big-ass roles, those surly, enormous rodeo bulls of the last century—Willy Loman, Iago, a Chekhov play, a Sam Shepard play with John C. Reilly where every couple nights the actors switched parts. Just knee deep in the whole thing all the time, working, working, dredging every role for little shards of something and holding them up to the light.
In 2008 he does Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, about a playwright who is both deranged and marched out into the sea by his own ambitions. “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.” In magazine profiles he’s quoting Philip Roth lines like “Old age isn’t a battle; old age is a massacre.” He sees his friend Ethan Hawke do Ivanov and he can't shake himself loose from it. There's a monologue where Ivanov says, “I wander like a shadow among other men, not knowing why I am alive or what it is that I want,” and even weeks later Hoffman is still talking about the play.
When Death of a Salesman premieres on Broadway in 2012 they wonder in the reviews if at 44 years old he is still too young to fit all that compromise and gray misery of 62-year-old Willy Loman onto his face. The New York Times says he is “uncomfortably cast” and never quite seems “credible.” But there is an idea that by then a year of Philip Seymour Hoffman contained in it more stress and contemplation, more toil and effort, more long cold nights out there in the abyss and back again than the average man, finding and rescuing one more character at his worst and seeming to have no greater clarity or lasting satisfactions, only the little bit of time you’d bought yourself.
During Salesman he’ll text cast members until after midnight with notes, suggestions, barely sleeping. He rehearses lines with his own son when he gets home. The whole thing is pulverizing him, it seems, and sometime around here he is drinking again, too.
There is an audio recording I found from a night during that 2012 run of the play. His voice is raw, this dehydrated strangle.
It doesn’t sound like anyone he had ever played before, and in this way it is exactly right, here is the sum total, here is the man left at the bottom of the ledger after a lifetime. Here is Willy Loman, from that stage in Rochester to middle age and all those roles in between, all the ways the young man becomes the father. For 30 years Philip Seymour Hoffman has been doing something like dragging a busted valise behind him, trying to make a sale.
In the days after they found him in his apartment dead of a drug overdose there was this specific type of article that you kept seeing, from the rags to the places of renown, INSIDE HIS LAST HOURS, piecing together a timeline in increasingly perverse detail. How much money he took out from the ATM to buy all that heroin, in $200 increments, how long he hung around that bodega till the fraud protection lifted and he could do it all over again; the sight of him slumped over in business class on the flight back from Atlanta; a cheeseburger for dinner; anonymous reports of him “acting strangely”; what the neighbors said about his outfits.
There was this implication in all the squalid details, the urge to connect these desperations to the characters he played, that what we had been watching all along was not a man at his job but actual scenes of personal wreckage, and here in the papers was one final Philip Seymour Hoffman Movie. But this would diminish his ferocious talent, the way he worked to wrangle it, the brutal journeys he went on. It would reduce the man and his labor to his sickness, and that, too, is a tragedy. All of that was work, the plain old brawl every day with the one thing that ever made you feel quite right.
“The best you’ll ever feel is when you’ve done a good job. That’s the best you’ll ever feel. When I was shooting Capote or I was shooting any film I’ve done, or done any play, that the day that ended where I felt like I acted well and I went home and I was able to breathe a free breath that was long and deep, you know, and go to bed and my eyes shut and I went to sleep peacefully. Those...that's as good as it gets.”
John Saward is a writer living in Chicago. You can follow him on Bluesky.