By the time the initial news alert of his death hit my cell phone, the New York Post was reporting that Philip Seymour Hoffman (winner of a Best Actor Oscar, as well as nearly every other acting-related award) had died of an apparent heroin overdose and had been found with the needle still in his arm. That last detail was typically sordid for the headline-selling Post, but a jarring last description of a 46-year-old father of three with one of the most respected catalogue of roles of any actor of our time. When I walked outside of my apartment there was already the usual scrum of police, photographers, news vans, live video shoots and general onlookers, filling up Bethune Street, a block south of where I live. With such intimate knowledge of his final moments broadcast to the public, it seemed at that moment that the dignity of his art would always be intertwined with the ignominy and spectacle of his passing.
As a high school junior, in 2000, I was bused with my English Lit classmates to New York to see Hoffman and John C. Reilly perform Sam Shepard’s True West at the Circle in the Square Theater. The play centers around two diametrically opposed brothers, Austin and Lee, who over the course of the play exchange binary roles (one law-abiding and successful, the other a dissolute petty criminal) and take on the characteristics and values of the other, an emotionally fraught process that reaches a terrible and violent climax. I have no idea who made this unorthodox selection for our students’ field trip, but he really shot the lights out. Maybe he knew the production was a real barn-burner, a one-of-a-kind opportunity to see two gifted actors perform one of America’s best plays. More to his credit, perhaps he had an inkling that testosterone-drenched, occasionally violent theater would play well with a bunch of teenage boys. Who knows? Whatever the reason, I’m glad I had the chance. Watching Austin and Lee get tangled up like the DNA strands they shared marked the first time I was truly transformed by art, the first time my gut felt ransacked. I was so struck with wonder that I had trouble speaking. I’ll always remember the way Hoffman announced in the eighth scene, after his character (Austin, the previously upright citizen) has boosted an entire neighborhood’s worth of toasters: “There’s gonna’ be a general lack of toast in the neighborhood this morning. Many, many bewildered breakfast faces.” The absurdist line is funny, of course, but I heard a sense of desperation in it too, the need to prove himself to his brother while hurtling toward a breakdown.
This was around the same time in high school when, short on friends but long on artistic ambition, I watched Hoffman portray rock journalist Lester Bangs in Cameron Crowe’s rock ’n’ roll bildungsroman, Almost Famous, and found a friend on the screen, or at least the kind of avuncular figure a kid looks to for some comforting words. At the time I saw myself through the film’s novice writer, William Miller, drinking up the advice of Bangs, through Hoffman, who unloads unforgettable bon mots like, “The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone else when we’re uncool,” and “Good looking people don’t have any spine—their art never lasts.” This was the exact balm I needed as a conflicted and awkward teenager. Hoffman’s spot-on portrayal led me to think he had been there too.
After college I moved to a studio in the West Village, a quaint, storied part of Manhattan where red-bricked townhouses sell for the equivalent sum of certain frontier market countries’ annual GDP. Needless to say, we have plenty of celebrities here, including, until February 2, 2014, Philip Seymour Hoffman.
Hoffman belonged to this group of West Village celebrities because he was a movie star, but in some ways he was not one of them, either. Sure, he was famous, a big shot actor, but I would often see him pedal a real clunker of a bicycle down West 4th Street, taking the corner wide left on West 12th Street and letting his left leg hang over the bike’s crankset as he moseyed back home. Needless to say, I don’t see other neighborhood celebrities hop on bikes, busted ones or not. They duck their heads into the void of a waiting black car, most of the time.
Hoffman had this natural shagginess around him that seem to have the power to wilt a non-iron oxford shirt within a couple of minutes. I loved watching him from the window of a cafe, ambling about the neighborhood like some affable small-town mayor who runs unopposed every year. He comfortably hung out in the local cafes, reading the papers until his family would join him an hour or so later.
Simply put, he was a local. He seemed a part of this neighborhood in a way that the other celebrities—the good-looking, spineless ones Lester Bangs warned us about—could never be. Hoffman was a longtime member of the LAByrinth Theater Company in the West Village, where he performed and directed several productions. For a certain period of time, he was the co-artistic director. His long-time partner Mimi O’Donnell, the mother of his three children, is now its artistic director. On my morning commute I’d often cross Greenwich Street and find myself walking alongside him with his children in tow. I was always tempted to thank him for that performance in True West and say it transformed me in a way that you can only experience a handful of times in life. It made me realize that a certain, select group of people have the power, formidable as it is, to move you like a plaything across the emotional spectrum. It made me want to move to New York so I could be near that locus of art creation, and find those transformative moments again. I held off on unburdening myself of all this because he looked just so pleased to be with kids.
In their performance of True West, Hoffman and Reilly would switch the roles of Austin and Lee from time to time, not just to stage a feat of acting prowess but to better explore the brothers’ umbilical connection. No matter how close they came to tearing out each other’s throats, the brothers understood each other, needed each other. The day I saw them, Hoffman was playing the role of Austin, the vaguely preppy, successful screenwriter and family man while Reilly took on the role of Austin’s older, derelict brother, Lee. Over the course of the play Austin becomes more like his degenerate brother, while Lee courts respectability with a Hollywood producer by pitching a hare-brained screenplay idea. By the end of the play, clean-cut Austin is choking Lee with a telephone cord after Lee has announced he’ll be heading to the desert without Austin. He only relents when he thinks Lee is dead. After a few tense moments we learn that isn’t the case, and Lee is back on his feet, blocking Austin’s exit in a brotherly showdown of biblical proportions. The final moments of the play are haunting, and I’ll never forget Hoffman and Reilly, their chests expanding and contracting in huge gulps of air, facing each other as the stage lights went down.
There’s a lot to draw from the scene. When I saw it I was stunned by how Austin, the square, the straight arrow, could suddenly summon such unfettered aggression, especially against his own blood relation. You might even say he wielded that aggression against himself, since Austin and Lee are inextricably linked to each other, each the yin to the other’s yang. After hearing of Hoffman’s death I immediately thought of that scene and how it evoked the self-destructive arc he followed.
It wasn’t not the first time Hoffman took on dark roles. It seemed for every comic role he played in a movie like The Big Lebowski, there were more in which he fearlessly confronted the worst aspects of human nature. He played a compulsive, joyless, high-stakes casino gambler who bankrolls his addiction by skimming the bank where he works in Owning Mahowny. In Sidney Lumet’s relentlessly bleak final film, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, his character has embezzled from his employer to fund a drug habit, and stages a botched robbery of his parent’s jewelry store to get the cash to escape to Brazil. He’s an obscene telephone caller in Happiness, and, my personal favorite, the Ivy League creepster Freddie Miles in The Talented Mister Ripley.
Did his own demons allow him to channel the frightening ability to play such roles? I don’t know, and honestly we’ll never know. But that hasn’t stopped a swirl of newspapers and media outlets from eulogizing him within the context of addiction, as if that were the core of his being. There are a lot of ways to remember Hoffman, and for me, at least, the enduring impressions derive from that stunning performance in True West and from the neighborly glimpses I saw of him in the West Village.
It’s similar to my feelings about the play. The after-image of the brothers poised and on the brink of escalating violence has a shocking, indelible impact on the audience as a final message, but there are so many quieter, playful moments worth remembering and championing earlier on in the play. It is more than just a line of brutish action careening toward a thrashing climax. In the same way, you could fix your attention on that final, sordid moment of Hoffman’s life, or you could choose to remember the entire wonderful performance he gave us.