Martin Schoeller/AUGUST Phillip Seymour Hoffman on the awning of Rolling Stone. In annual of Philip Seymour Hoffman's final film, A A lot of Capital Man, hitting theaters today, we are copy David Browne's awning adventure on the actor's final canicule from our February 27th issue.
Slouched in the foreground row of the coil Amphitheater Company's achievement amplitude in New York's West Village endure May, Philip Seymour Hoffman was his archetypal focused, superdisciplined self. In the affectionate 90-seat theater, Hoffman – consistently dressed in one or addition of his acutely changeable billowing pants and sweaters – was relentlessly blame the casting and aggregation of the play he was directing, A Ancestors for All Occasions, a new plan by his acquaintance Bob Glaudini. With his brand near-religious adventure for perfection, Hoffman bedeviled over every aspect of the production. "From the napkin holder on the dining allowance table, every minute detail was debated and anticipation out," recalls the company's managing director, Danny Feldman. "Even afterwards aperture night, he said, 'We're still alive – we're still in rehearsal.'"
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While Hoffman was working, he was consistently in complete command. "When he absolved into a room, he didn't accept to say anything," says a friend, Donovan Leitch. "He had a Bill Clinton affectionate of energy." But abroad from the actualization he was agilely accident control. Two canicule afterwards A Ancestors for All Occasions opened, Hoffman arrested himself into adjust afterwards decree drugs had triggered a backsliding of his heroin use. Few if any in the play had accustomed annihilation was amiss. "Whatever difficulties were traveling on afresh were not to be beheld," recalls Glaudini. "He was present, there, creative. There was no ambidextrous with the aberrant artist." It was the aboriginal assurance of the clandestine attempt of a man accustomed to his abounding accompany as a aerialist of barbaric conduct and acutely bottomless talent.
Hoffman, with his shock of strawberry-blond hair, pale-blue eyes and beefy physique, was the a lot of apparent anti-star Everyman in Hollywood, anyone who by force of accomplishment had absolute himself into acceptable a arch man. Regardless of what blur he was in, it was cool to not be apparitional by the actualization he portrayed: the abettor in Magnolia, the bent complete man in Boogie Nights, the affluent high-hat in The Talented Mr. Ripley, the backward bedrock analyzer Lester Bangs in Almost Famous, even the storm-chasing stoner in Twister. "Phil was an anarchistic cine ablaze in an era area there's no such affair as unconventionality," says his acquaintance Ethan Hawke. "Now, everybody is attractive and has abs. And actuality you accept Phil continuing up, saying, 'Hey, I got something to say, too! It may not be pretty, but it's true.' That's why we bare him so badly."
By never phoning in even the aboriginal locations and consistently empathizing with a character's vulnerabilities, Hoffman was generally awarded, walking abroad with an Oscar for his spot-on assuming of Truman Capote in 2005's Capote; Sidney Lumet, who directed him in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, already compared him to Marlon Brando (Hoffman, in archetypal fashion, scoffed at the compliment). "He was the greatest of his generation, and more," says Cameron Crowe, who directed him in Almost Famous. "He was an actor's actor."
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Even as he was disturbing to get clean, Hoffman's drive wouldn't let him apathetic down. He had two films in the can – Anton Corbijn's abstruseness A A lot of Capital Man and the abomination brawl God's Pocket, directed by John Slattery – and was set to arise in the next two Hunger Games movies, rolling out over the next two years. He was advancing to ablaze in a Showtime series, Happyish, and to absolute Ezekiel Moss, starring Amy Adams and Jake Gyllenhaal. "He capital to be done with arena the sad-sack loser, the guy who's jerking off," says author Stephen Adly Guirgis, a longtime friend. "He admired those characters and accustomed them, but if he did A Backward Quartet [a easygoing brawl about classical musicians, in 2012], he said that it was his best performance, and he never talked that way about himself."
But on Sunday, February 2nd, all those affairs went to dust. That morning, Mimi O'Donnell, his longtime accomplice and mother of their three children, texted David Bar Katz, addition one of Hoffman's abutting author friends. Hoffman, who had been active afar from his ancestors for a few months afterwards falling off the wagon and affective to an accommodation two blocks away, was declared to aces up their kids and hadn't apparent up. With Hoffman's assistant, Isabella Wing-Davey, Katz went to Hoffman's place, opened the aperture and was confronted with a abominable sight: Hoffman, in shorts and a T-shirt, asleep in the bathroom, a aggravate in his larboard arm.
Later, badge appear they had activate about 50 baby accoutrements of heroin, some acclimated and some unopened. Katz disputes that account. "I don't accept those reports, because I was there," he says. "I didn't go through his drawers, but I'd never accustomed Phil to put annihilation in a drawer. He'd consistently put it on the floor. Phil was a bit of a slob." An balance is doubtable as the could cause of death, but toxicology letters are pending. Hoffman was 46.
The account was absolutely jarring, not atomic because of how it embodied the Hollywood clichés Hoffman had connected fought against. He had aboveboard accustomed to a biologic botheration and had formed harder at advancement abnegation for added than two decades. Of the vices that remained, he told RS in 2005, "Pure aperture – cigarettes and food, but apparently cigarettes added than food." He didn't aggrandize activity on the edge. "He believed you don't accept to die with a aggravate in your arm to be a abundant artist," Guirgis says. His accompany say he was not on a bottomward circling – if anything, says Katz, "he was on an advancement spiral."
Hoffman was still absorbed in his career with an acuteness that could alarm his castmates. He had aught altruism for apathetic acting or ablaze treatment. If he capital to lose weight for a role, as he did for Capote, he did it by himself, developing his own exercise regimen: traveling to the bounded basketball cloister and demography one awkward shot, followed by push-ups and sit-ups and afresh sprinting to the added end of the cloister and demography a right-handed shot, falling to the balk for added push-ups and crunches. He'd echo the accustomed afresh and again.
He zeroed in relentlessly on his work, to the point of ambitious that accompany like Katz not appointment him on set. ("He said, 'Look at me – just seeing that announcement is gonna fuck me up,'" says Katz. "Phil was so austere he could be scary.") He told a acquaintance he acquainted he'd done such a bad job in one play that he capital to move to France and become an English teacher. "We all anticipate if anyone is gifted, 'Oh, they're gifted,' but we don't anticipate about how abundant plan it takes to exercise that gift," says Guirgis. "He acclimated to say, 'It's just as aching to do something able-bodied as it is to do it not well.' He was ample of himself. And he acutely paid a amount for it." Or as Hawke puts it, "He went to war for his art."
Yet there was another, apparitional Hoffman, anyone who, for all his allure and confidence, was abreast troubled. "He agitated an unearned accountability of shame," Guirgis says. "He was private, but he played those characters so able-bodied because he knew something about answerability and abashment and suffering."
Talking with Rolling Stone in 2005, Hoffman accustomed that locations of him remained off-limits: "No one knows me. No one understands me. That's the added affair that changes as you get older. It's like everybody understands you. But no one understands me."
As cool as it is now to contemplate, Philip Seymour Hoffman did not initially see himself as an actor. Growing up in Fairport, a suburb of Rochester, New York, Hoffman had altered sorts of dreams. He was a adolescent of divorce; his ancestor formed for Xerox, his mother was a judge. "He accustomed something aphotic and sad about animal behavior," says Guirgis, "but the absolute guy was a fuckin' abecedarian from Rochester – that's who he was." He never absent that side: His New York accompany anamnesis how harder he could bang a whiffle brawl or pin them to the ground. "He'd outwrestle me constantly," says Katz. "It was like, 'You're the abandoned getting in the apple who gets stronger from bistro ice cream.'"
In Hoffman's green year of top school, though, a abutting abrasion during a angry bout (he aswell played football) afflicted him to amend his goals. He'd been absorbed by amphitheater before, actualization in a grade-school assembly of Tom Sawyer, but afresh the acting bug hit him, and he active up for roles in Arthur Miller's The Crucible and Death of a Salesman. "When he played Willy Loman, that was the aboriginal time anybody said, 'Holy crap,'" recalls a classmate. He anguish up at NYU, area he accelerating in 1989 with a BFA in drama. In college, Hoffman partied harder – "advanced" bubbler and drugging, as he afterwards alleged it, was acceptable a problem. "You get panicked," he said in 2006. "It fabricated me afraid if I was traveling to get to do the affectionate of things I capital to do in my life." He assuredly arrested himself into adjust at 22 – and accustomed how abundant he was accustomed for throwing himself 100 percent into anything, the account didn't shock his adolescence friends.
After a few bit parts, Hoffman's career finer launched if he landed a baby role in 1992's Scent of a Woman. (He aswell helped admirers actors for that blur by alive as a band reader; one who didn't accomplish the cut was Hawke. "You're never gonna get it, associate – you're too interesting," Hoffman told him.) By 1993, he'd confused to Los Angeles and started landing roles in films like When a Man Loves a Woman and Twister. Afresh came his ablaze achievement in Paul Thomas Andeson's porn-industry opus, Boogie Nights, in 1997, followed by Happiness and The Big Lebowski in 1998. Searching to plan added in theater, Hoffman alternate to New York in 1999, but he connected authoritative enduring impressions in movies like Magnolia and The Talented Mr. Ripley. If Crowe beatific Hoffman the Software for Almost Famous, assertive he'd be absolute as the abandoned bedrock analyzer Bangs, Hoffman apprehend it, accustomed and flew out to Crowe's appointment for their aboriginal meeting. "He showed up dressed Lester-ish – he had a atramentous covering anorak on, and you could see he had a glint in his eye," Crowe recalls. "He was instantly a huge presence, not clashing Lester."
In just a few takes – while aggressive the flu – Hoffman nailed his now-famous "we're uncool" phone-call arena with apprentice RS anchorman William Miller (Patrick Fugit). Between takes, Hoffman listened to recordings of Bangs on headphones. "He'd cull them off appropriate afore he was accessible to go," Crowe says. "He set a advance and was acid through the water. You were captivated to watch him. He was added bedrock & cycle than I knew."
During those years, admitting the boundless acclaim, Hoffman was rarely casting in any arch roles. Hollywood couldn't see anyone with his anarchistic anatomy and accustomed looks accustomed a movie. About 2000, a friend, writer-director Todd Louiso, who roomed with him in L.A., started arcade about what would be Hoffman's aboriginal starring vehicle, Love Liza, a aphotic ball about a man grappling with his wife's suicide. "He was searching for a blur to ablaze in," Louiso says. "But we went to accession money for it, and they were like, 'That's insane. Him, a arch man?' Humans would get afraid about that." It wasn't until Louiso casting the better-known Kathy Bates that Love Liza was able to accession a bashful $1 abecedarian budget.
Even if he wasn't accepting asset starring roles, Hoffman was acutely everywhere. For the next few years, he was featured in thrillers (Red Dragon), cool bartering romps (Along Came Polly) and august epics (Cold Mountain) afore assuredly accepting his adventitious to backpack a cine in Capote. "I just wasn't abiding if I should do it," he told RS of Capote. "It's a actual chancy project. There's annihilation amiss with demography a risk, but if you're not abiding if you're the appropriate getting to yield it or not, you're not sure." Not surprisingly, Hoffman nailed what became a defining role in his career. "He was no best 'promising' or 'interesting,'" says Hawke. "He was in complete ascendancy of a actual complicated part. He'd developed up." Hoffman had aswell accomplished in added ways: He and O'Donnell, a apparel artisan he'd met in 1999, never married, but they had their aboriginal child, Cooper, in 2003, followed by daughters Tallulah and Willa.
Hoffman reacted to his Oscar win as abandoned he could: abiding to his accepted accustomed of walking his kids to academy and aimless about his West Village haunts bubbler coffee and smoker cigarettes. "He wasn't complete in such a way as to affliction about that Oscar stuff," says Katz. "Did he acknowledge it? Yes. He wasn't audacious of awards. But accepting the Academy Award, in some sense, to him would be the agnate of accepting an simple laugh. You're blessed you got the laugh, but it's not about that, it's about your work. And that's what he was searching at, always."
In 2007, Hoffman took on one of his darkest roles yet, in the abstruseness Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, directed by Lumet, a Hoffman hero who was afresh 83. Although he'd accustomed Hoffman for years, Hawke was assuredly able to plan with his acquaintance on that cine – and activate the acquaintance added acute than he'd imagined. "It was the aboriginal time I formed with an abecedarian of my bearing who fabricated me nervous," Hawke says. "If you were just getting absorbing or some affectionate of bullshit, you'd get the ablution of disapproval. If you were a hair's across backward for a cue, you'd get this glance of 'Are you an amateur? Fuck!'"
During rehearsals for Devil, co-star Marisa Tomei recalls, Hoffman absolved about with a pad of cardboard with scribbles all over it. "He said it was a diagram of what his actualization was doing," she says. "It looked like Egyptian hieroglyphics. He said he had to accumulate the plates spinning."
Other accompany anamnesis how ambitious Hoffman could be on them, all for the account of the best achievement and assembly possible. Katz recalls continuing with Hoffman afterwards a account of one of Katz's plays. If it was over, admirers approached Katz, weeping. "But Phil looks at me and says, 'Don't let this go to your arch – this play needs a lot of work,'" Katz remembers. "To him, the affecting acknowledgment was not authentic. And Phil was always right. He was a accuracy machine." Addition time, a band in one of Katz's plays that elicited a beam from an admirers spurred Hoffman to breeze at Katz, "You wish to be a clown? You wish to entertain? Cut it."
Outside the Public Amphitheater in New York, Hoffman was already apparent pacing aback and forth, cursing about an aspect of a assembly that had gone wrong. "Life is abandoned as acceptable as the day you do your plan well," he told RS in 2005. "You're alive and you do acceptable work. But how you feel afterwards that moment is the achievement you backpack with you. And it's as annoyed as you'll get, you apperceive what I mean?"
For the accomplished few years, alive with his accompany in amphitheater while acting in huge Hollywood roles, Hoffman seemed to ability new zeniths. He'd been nominated for Oscars for Best Supporting Abecedarian three times in 5 years, for Charlie Wilson's War (2007), Doubt (2008) and The Master (2012). He'd co-founded Coil with abecedarian and acquaintance John Ortiz in the 1990s; its achievement amplitude and acquisition of aesthetic accompany became his additional home, a few minutes' airing from his apartment. "We were acutely close, but the aggregate of our accord was work, and that was acute and all-encompassing," says Guirgis. "We didn't go fishing, you know."
Hoffman was the admired ancestor of the troupe. Generous with his earnings, he gave added than $300,000 to accumulate Coil active and even paid for friends' rent. He absolutely didn't absorb the banknote on his appearance. "Mimi was able to acquaint new clothes into his wardrobe," Guirgis says with a laugh. "She'd consistently say, 'Phil, this is what I do for a living!' He'd acquisition a way to accomplish them attending like he'd been cutting them for 20 years."
Hoffman referred to his concrete actualization with absorbing self-deprecation. Two years ago, he showed up for a TV account in Manhattan on his bicycle, decrepit sweat, boring his bike into an elevator and bouncing off a appeal for makeup. "What for?" he joked. "It can't absolutely help."
But recently, Hoffman was searching added frayed than usual. To some abutting friends, he wasn't absolutely the aforementioned afterwards he threw himself into arena Willy Loman in Mike Nichols' Broadway assembly of Death of a Salesman in 2012, earning his third Tony Award nomination. It was the role of a lifetime, and Hoffman tore into it, breaking down in tears nightly onstage. "That play bent him," says Katz, who would see him every morning afterwards they abandoned their kids off at the aforementioned school. "He was afflicted through that absolute run. No amount what he was doing, he knew that at 8:00 that night he'd do that to himself again. If you accumulate accomplishing that on a around-the-clock basis, it rewires your brain, and he was accomplishing that to himself every night. If it was over, he said to me he wasn't traveling to act in amphitheater for a while."
Later that year, Hoffman abandoned by Hawke's off-Broadway assembly of Chekhov's Ivanov. (Hoffman was admired for the means in which he would consistently bolt his friends' amphitheater plan and action his support. "He was a stand-up, show-up guy," says Guirgis.) Backstage, Hawke noticed a different, added afflicted Hoffman. "Ivanov is about abasement and the atramentous aperture you can abatement into if abasement descends," Hawke says. "To be honest, it was a little abashing how abundant that play afflicted him. He admired that play. It absolutely batten to him. He was not at his happiest."
Hawke says he never saw Hoffman yield a alcohol until he was in Salesman. Not connected afterwards that production, Hoffman told a acquaintance that he'd been abstaining so connected – 23 years – that he acquainted he could accident bubbler afresh "in moderation." But by the next bounce he had arrested himself into rehab.
It wasn't abundant to acclimatized his addiction. At the end of 2013, at O'Donnell's insistence, he had confused out of their home and into a adjacent accommodation he'd busy as a plan space. (He'd taken the abode to activate with because, as he told a friend, he couldn't acquire curve with three kids active around.) "They were consistently in touch, and he would've been aback in the abode the moment he was clean," says Guirgis. "She was committed to him for activity – she said it to me endure night – and he was committed to her." In December, Hoffman seemed to backsliding again. He abounding a Narcotics Anonymous affair and said he was counting his abnegation "in days." Less than a anniversary afore his death, he alleged a anchorman from the set of Hunger Games and articulate incoherent, slurry and almost alive in the average of the afternoon; he kept apathy names of humans he'd formed with. Photos alike of Hoffman searching absolutely disheveled, bubbler abandoned in bars. On the night of February 1st, afterwards he'd announced to O'Donnell, he reportedly withdrew $1,200 in banknote from a grocery-store ATM, and gave it to two men, whom badge doubtable supplied him with heroin.
Whatever precipitated Hoffman's baleful bender, accompany advance it was not a baleful band but a backsliding angry deadly. "The addiction was consistently aggravating to acquisition a way aback in, and it started application the abstraction that the kid was an addict, and now he's an developed with absurd willpower," says Katz. "He was a guy in his midforties who said to himself, 'I never had a alcohol or acclimated drugs in my developed life.' So maybe the developed anticipation he could handle it."
The physique of plan he leaves abaft charcoal a accolade to his attempt for excellence, a active charge to actualize and work. He had 55 affected and TV movies beneath his belt, an amazing amount for anyone who'd been in the business for abandoned 23 years. "How did he do that?" Louiso says. "He channeled that addictive personality into his work." His ceaseless drive may accept been a way of confusing himself. A friend, writer-producer Jeff Roda, wrote afterwards Hoffman's death, "Phil accomplished me something about genius. It commits afterwards prejudice, believes aboveboard and cobweb endlessly and afterwards restraint. It is consistently pushing, pushing, blame against the edge, wherever that may be."
Hoffman's afterlife leaves a broad aperture – with his family, with his accompany at the Coil company, and in the arts world. And it leaves unanswered, for now, the catechism of how a able able with such a ample amount of abstemiousness for so connected confused off the wagon just connected abundant for a baleful fall. "What happened was one adverse moment," says Katz. "He had his bits together, and capital to live. The 'downward spiral,' that affectionate of clichéd narrative, was not the reality."
In the canicule afterwards Hoffman's death, a beck of accompany – Paul Thomas Anderson, Joaquin Phoenix, Cate Blanchett and added colleagues – abandoned by the Hoffman home to pay their respects. Three nights afterwards his death, a candlelight acuity was captivated in the snow-and-slush-filled courtyard alfresco the Labyrinth. Author Eric Bogosian apprehend a acclaim to his friend: "In this apple of aesthetic enterprise, it is ultimately up to the artisan to adjudge how top a bar he or she will set for himself. Phil set his bar on the accomplished rung. On a rung aloft the accomplished rung. He pushed himself relentlessly, until assuredly his efforts around redefined the actual endeavor we alarm 'acting.' He capital to bedrock the world." The hundreds aggregate lit votive candles and captivated them aloft. Admitting the abiding dribble from the winter storm, none were extinguished.
This adventure is from the February 27th, 2014 affair of Rolling Stone.
From The Archives Affair 1203: February 27, 2014
