His Feminine Side
Can Philip Seymour Hoffman do no wrong?
The Observer, February 2006
I really like it here,’ Philip Seymour Hoffman says as he takes his seat on a sofa in a suite at the Dorchester. ‘The place has some character. It’s not just hotelness all over the place.’ It is shortly after noon, and in a few hours Hoffman will receive a Bafta for his masterly portrayal of Truman Capote. He shed many pounds to play the role, and learnt to hold himself upright and immaculately, but now much of the weight and slouch and college-boy clothes are back on, and he is doing very un-Capote-like things. The strangest of which is something he is doing with the sofa cushions, taking two on each side and hugging them to his stomach and hips, a brocade buffer against something unknown – extended media interest, perhaps, or the prospect of his career profile changing from indie darling to something much bigger. For this is Hoffman’s golden hour – a Golden Globe, a Bafta and in a few days probably an Oscar – and he declares he’s finding it ‘interesting’.
‘Before this year I’d been nominated for a couple of Tonys and never won. I won a couple of smaller things. But I’ve never been nominated or won anything like this, and I’ve been acting professionally for 15 years. Actors know rejection – I understand not getting the prize, we’re all there. So I’m coming to check this out and see what it’s all about, and then maybe at least I can say, “well, I won’t do that ever again”.’
For a big star, Hoffman is relatively little known; even people who have seen many of his movies can’t quite place the name. He has made 38 films, one for every year of his life, some of them too obscure even for the video store – My New Gun, Joey Breaker, Next Stop Wonderland – but many of them invested with a level of intensity that stays with you long after the ride home: Boogie Nights, The Big Lebowski, Happiness, Magnolia, The Talented Mr Ripley, State and Main, Almost Famous, Punch-Drunk Love, Cold Mountain. Even his walk-ons tend to be scene-stealers. But now something else is happening: leading roles.
He has done a couple of these before, most notably Love Liza, written by his older brother Gordy Hoffman, but Capote is the breakthrough. There are several reasons why this has taken so long. One of them is his willingness to make himself uglier than he is. He was quoted as saying that when he was on his drama course at New York University in the late-1980s he had told a friend that he would never be better looking than others in his class, so to get the work he would simply have to be a better actor. But now he doesn’t recognise that comment.
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