Philip Seymour Hoffman — A man whose heart beat through the screen
There have been only a few actors in Hollywood whose inner-world gets captured on screen like with that of Philip Seymour Hoffman. As if the camera itself, pointed at his face, effortlessly seeps into the most serious complexities of his heart — complexities from which the actor’s own drama exposes, demonstrating what we all feel and what we all know we feel and yet manage to hide from ourselves.
Mostly undiscovered as actors like Hoffman tend to be (for life screams louder and bites harder for those with heightened sensitivity), such actors once discovered stay away from the spotlight. They do not buy into being a celebrity. They wear normal clothes. They do not care to be seen in a trendy place. In short, they are everyday men. They were that way before stardom took hold of them. They remained that way after. On screen they depict everyday people, and sometimes get put into a box as a character actor. And though often cast as underdogs, misfits or addicts — it is in the direction of being dangerously sensitive to the point of being unfit for the world that one special actor’s performances takes off into our world.
And his name is Philip Seymour Hoffman.
Philip Seymour Hoffman was born in Plainfield, NY in 1967. He received his BFA in Acting from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. While he gained recognition in films such as “Boogie Nights,” (1997) by Paul Thomas Anderson, “Twister” (1996) where he depicted a hippy-fratboy-storm-chaser, or in “The Big Lebowski” (1998) and “Almost Famous,” (2000), Hoffman spent the majority of his acting career working in more independent films such as “Synecdoche: New York,” (2008) written and directed by Charlie Kaufman.
In much of Hoffman’s 23 year career he depicts vulnerable characters pushed against something to the point of a complete breakdown. He was most known for showing himself emotionally naked in his roles. So much so he helped the audience feel in the process of seeing him feel. On screen he often played characters who found it especially hard to protect themselves from the slings and arrows of existence. And it was in his visceral reactions to this that made him utterly captivating to watch, namely for his brilliant capacity at revealing emotions so outwardly and expansively.
Hoffman was not considered attractive. His features and look was ordinary, even less than ordinary, giving him the gift to play more subterranean, misunderstood characters that tend to be hard-up, hard-living, and hard against something. Compared to many well-known actors in the industry, whose faces seem to be chiseled to perfection, Hoffman was often cast in supporting roles and on rare occasions as a lead, such as in “Capote” (2005). where he played an alcoholic writer whose real life came to a halt due to an alcohol and drug problem. In “Love Liza” (2002), Hoffman played a recent widower, after his wife commits suicide. Searching for answers to her motives, he takes the edge off of existence through his addiction to sniffing gasoline. In “God’s Pocket” he played a boozy lowlife. He became a power addict in “The Master” (2012). In “Almost Famous,” he even portrayed the real life music journalist, Lester Bangs, whose real cause of death was attributed to an an accidental overdose, which really hit close to home for Hoffman.
That’s because after a career filled with portraying such profound characters, in February of 2014 Hoffman died alone in his New York City apartment from a heroin overdose not so different than a role he might have played on screen. So similar to the characters he depicted, he fell prey to an opiate addiction which he had mostly kept at bay since the 90s. He left the world at the young age of 46, making it but impossible not to imagine the countless other roles he would have portrayed had he lived a little longer. And yet, that did not happen. Instead, he died an untimely death; he died a death from a substance addiction he had been wrestling with for several decades, which begs the question on whether he was such a brilliant actor due to the hard times he had in his personal life; hard times which had awakened him to deep emotional depths for which he descended to on cue time and time again. Could all of this been the reason he was able to access those deep places in his acting?
Such questions are dangerous to pose. And yet, when both the characters he depicted and the man himself seem to have so much in common — it’s hard to not connect a few dots.
As alcoholic writers write about characters with alcohol problems, same goes for actors who depict a kind of person who has similar tendencies to him or herself. Consequently, does this mean that Hoffman was a practitioner of the famous Stanislavski's method insomuch that he revealed the truth of his characters from his own true experience? And further, that we, as actors, should find something similar within ourselves to the characters we play that informs the roles we choose to play? Or maybe it is possible to go to deep emotional places in character without having lived a certain kind of life to match the one on screen?
These are all big and serious questions. They are dangerous questions. For writers as it goes with actors, to believe that one must experience certain things to depict them — experiences which are very harmful and dangerous which in turn come baring deeper insights about the human experience — very quickly makes the slope far more steep and slippery.
Unfortunately the great Philip Seymour Hoffman is not here with us any longer to shine a light on such thought-provoking imponderables. Many people have speculated on the subject. And yet, similar to all powerful works of art — there is no answer to how one master craftsman did what they did. There are plenty of speculations. There is much to theorize. But in the end, we have examples of how the result looks after the work has been done. And with Hoffman, luckily he left us with countless roles he played to study for a lifetime.
If curious to untangle Hoffman’s mysterious gift of acting a little more, check out the video below where he tries to explain to Charlie Rose his experience acting. In a way he almost hints at describing something akin to the Stanislavski method. What do you think?
-"The Master,” Starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, is now streaming on Tubi.
On Acting with Philip Seymour Hoffman