When Cooper Hoffman was in his teens, he didn’t have any grand plans for the future, though there was one thing he knew for sure: he did not want to be an actor. Why? “I didn’t want to do it because my dad did it so well, and it felt like I’d be going up against him. It would feel like I was inherently stepping into something competitive.”
Given Hoffman’s father is Philip Seymour Hoffman, Oscar-winning star of Boogie Nights, Almost Famous, The Master and Capote, you can see why he would feel that way. But then Paul Thomas Anderson, the Boogie Nights director who is a friend of the family, and whose children Cooper played with when he was growing up, asked him if he would read for a part. It was the lead in the 2021 film Licorice Pizza, about a teenage boy smitten with a woman in her mid-20s. It would not just be his first starring role, but his first role in anything. Hoffman ended up taking the job and was nominated for a Golden Globe for his efforts. In the years since, he says, he’s come to realise he’s not in competition with his dad at all. “I’m just doing the same thing he did, but in my own way.”
Talking via video call from his publicist’s offices in Los Angeles, Hoffman – who is now 22 – is articulate, self-possessed and subtly cautious with his answers; he keeps them brief and is not afraid of silence. This feels understandable, given the interest not just in him but in his father, who died from a drug overdose in 2014. Dressed in a pale blue sweater, with his sweep of strawberry blond hair arranged just so, Hoffman already has what you might call a Hollywood sheen. Since his screen debut four years ago, he has evolved from apple-cheeked youngster, at once goofy and charming, to serious adult actor with an enviable CV. Yet, much like his dad, there’s a softness and vulnerability to his features that is far removed from the average chisel-jawed screen hero.
Big strides … Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson in The Long Walk. Photograph: Murray Close/Lionsgate
He is here to talk about The Long Walk, the film based on the first novel written by Stephen King in the late 60s, when he was 19. Initially rejected by publishers, the book didn’t see the light of day until 1979, by which time King was a bestselling author. Set in a dystopian America, the novel tells of a brutal walking contest undertaken by a group of teenage boys who must maintain a speed of 4mph (3mph in the film). Those who slow down or stop get three warnings; then, if they don’t resume the required pace, they are shot dead. The winner is the last boy alive, who is granted a single wish and a life-changing cash prize.
The adaptation, directed by the Hunger Games’ Francis Lawrence, follows the progress of the entire group, though the drama centres in particular on Hoffman as teenager Ray Garraty, who has entered the competition despite the pleas of his mother, and fellow frontrunner Peter McVries, played by David Jonsson. The pair swap stories, share confidences and develop a sweet fraternal bond. Save for the odd flashback, the entire film plays out on the road, as the walkers deal with debilitating cramp, bleeding feet and exhaustion, all while watching their peers get ruthlessly picked off. Hoffman says he is loth to complain about the filming schedule, which occurred in sequence and required him and his co-stars to walk several miles per day while wearing less than ideal footwear.
I want to do things that feel difficult. I get overambitious and want to do a trial by fire
“Yeah, my boots couldn’t hack it,” he smiles. “I mean, it was hard but we were just making a movie, you know? We’re not solving cancer. But it was incredibly uncomfortable. You’re wearing a lot of clothes in hot weather and walking for hours so your feet hurt at the end of the day.”
With most of the cast members in their teens or early 20s, there was a camaraderie on set that Hoffman notes was “in no way competitive. You showed up to the table reading, and you showed up to the first day of walking, and you looked around and you’re like: ‘Everyone’s really doing this. I’ve got to show up for them.’”
Hoffman and Jonsson’s characters do what they can to boost morale and offer a helping hand. But there is a darkness to Hoffman’s Garraty, whose participation in the walk is connected to his grief at the premature death of his dad. That can’t have been a stretch, I say, given his own experience. “Yes, of course,” Hoffman replies, his lack of hesitation suggesting he’s anticipated this line of questioning. “It’s hard not to think about it when it’s on the page, when it’s right there in front of you. But as an actor, you have to look at it truthfully. And to attach all of my burden on to this character would be wrong, because my situation is different to his. Yes, we share a commonality, but it happened in very different ways.”
Court in the act … Cooper Hoffman with his father, Philip Seymour Hoffman, at a basketball game in New York in 2013. Photograph: James Devaney/FilmMagic
Hoffman was just 10 years old when his father died. To watch his dad on screen now, he says, “is great. He’s a great actor, but the characters he plays aren’t him.” To lose a parent so young, he says, “is a hard thing to go through”. He pauses. “What I will say is that my favourite movie of his is The Master, and I watch that quite frequently. I very much enjoy seeing his face in that movie.”
Though Hoffman caught the acting bug comparatively late, he and his younger sisters, Tallulah and Willa, grew up in New York immersed in the worlds of film and theatre. His mother is Mimi O’Donnell, a former costume designer who now works in podcasting. She and Seymour Hoffman met when he was directing a stage production of In Arabia We’d All Be Kings. O’Donnell wrote about her late husband and their family life for Vogue in 2017, and recalled his request that the family never be apart for more than two weeks at a time, even when he was filming. “More than once,” she wrote, remembering the period after Cooper was born, “I found myself asking, ‘You want to bring the baby to what?’ Or, ‘You want us to come to Winnipeg in the winter while you’re shooting?” And he’d say, ‘Just bring him. We all need to be together.’”
Hoffman smiles. “Yeah, that was our version of ‘bring your son or daughter to work day’,” though he adds that he was so little he has few memories of those visits. He can just about recall going to the Oscars with his father and hating the afterparty. “To be fair, again, I don’t remember a lot of it. I don’t think I liked the Oscars [ceremony] either, just because of how young I was and I had to sit still for a long time and wear a suit that I didn’t want to wear. But I don’t feel that way now.”
Slice of luck … Cooper Hoffman in the 2021 film Licorice Pizza. Photograph: Melinda Sue Gordon/MGM Pictures
Before acting took over, Hoffman had a handful of jobs that included being a general dogsbody at a bar in New York near the family home. “I would come in every day before the bar would open and set up, because I wasn’t actually allowed to be there when they were serving alcohol.” During the actors’ strike two years ago, he briefly got a job in construction, which he was surprised to find he enjoyed, and where he “made a lot of friends”. He was 17 when he was cast in Licorice Pizza, in which he played teenage actor turned entrepreneur Gary Valentine, who falls for a photographer’s assistant (played by musician and fellow screen newbie Alana Haim). The New Yorker hailed Haim and Hoffman’s “high-intensity yet gracefully poised performances”, while the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw called Hoffman “eerily assured”.
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For Hoffman, it was a baptism of fire. Even though being on set felt “more natural than I expected it to be”, the experience was “like boot camp. You’re getting told what a mark is. You’re getting told where to look, about eyelines and how to walk and what kind of little tricks [camera technicians] use to make something work. You’re in this wonderland of film, being in a Paul Thomas Anderson movie, and it’s something that I realise is an immense privilege.” While he tried not to think too hard about how his performance was being received, there were times when “I was just freaking out. I threw up one day on set because of how nervous I was. There was an inherent fear of messing up and being looked at.”
He still gets nervous when auditioning, likening it to getting ready for a date. “You shower, you make sure you smell nice and look nice, you want to come in and be your charismatic self, and then you want to wow them with your acting. And then the audition ends and you’re like: ‘Well, I hope they like me as much as I like them.’” After Licorice Pizza, Hoffman enrolled at an acting school in New York, largely because “everyone was telling me to go to”, but ended up leaving halfway through. “I found I just didn’t want to be in school. I wanted to go act.”
Luckily, since Licorice Pizza, the jobs have kept coming. He was NBC executive Dick Ebersol in last year’s Saturday Night, which told the origin story of Saturday Night Live, and played a rookie hitman alongside Christoph Waltz in Old Guy. At the start of this year, he made his off-Broadway stage debut in Sam Shepard’s Curse of the Starving Class, about a family down on their luck. After years spent watching plays and musicals, he had long thought theatre was “a brave thing to do. And I was like: ‘I want to be that brave and earn my stripes.’” Once again, he was thrown in the deep end; the play featured a live sheep on stage. “And I had to get naked and walk across the stage and kill it,” he says, with an amused sigh.
Hoffman has noticed a pattern in himself where, he says, “I get overambitious a lot of the time and want to do a trial by fire. I didn’t train, so I needed to learn on the job. I kept finding myself wanting to do things that felt difficult. [With the play] it would sometimes feel incredible and sometimes it would feel like the worst thing ever.”
A similar thing happened with the upcoming film I Want Your Sex, an erotic thriller where he stars alongside Olivia Wilde and Charli xcx. He plays Elliot, a young man who takes a job as a sexual muse to a renowned artist, played by Wilde. “She plays my dominatrix,” he says, with a look that suggests he was several miles outside his comfort zone. Did he surprise himself? “Yes, I did. I’m pretty proud of myself on that one. It’s one of those things where you’re so uncomfortable in a scene, but the character has to be enjoying it. It’s so hard to get yourself to a place of enjoyment when there’s a lot of people in the room seeing something vulnerable happen. But I feel like I did get there.”
Asked if he thinks he is a born actor, and whether acting talent can be inherited, Hoffman pauses and shakes his head. “I think that puts too much of a lock on what an actor can or cannot be. Just because you’re born into something doesn’t mean you have it, and just because you’re not doesn’t mean you don’t.” On the inevitable comparisons with his father, he says: “My mom gave me the best acting advice I’ve been given, which was: ‘You’re enough.’ She said: ‘The reason why people will watch you, the reason people will care about you, is because of you and the life that you’ve lived.’ And you know, I think that’s true.”
The Long Walk is in cinemas on 12 September.
