Philip Seymour Hoffman has just walked into a marble pillar on the first floor of the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Berlin. He staggers back, momentarily dazed — a state he must be getting used to, considering the furore surrounding his performance in
Capote. This year has been his: the Screen Actors Guild, Bafta and the Golden Globes all awarded Hoffman Best Actor for his remarkable transformation into the American author Truman Capote, and he is the favourite to complete the set at the Academy Awards next month.
However, as you might expect from a character player who has hitherto done his best work on the periphery of Hollywood, he’s never been to the Oscars. “I hesitate to judge it too much because I might be surprised,” he admits, his natural voice so rumbling that you wonder how he managed to impersonate Capote’s high-pitched whine. “But it’s an overwhelming process, the awards season. Being on camera in front of a live worldwide audience is not something that relaxes you into a nice warm nap.”
At the Baftas last Sunday most viewers were probably only dimly aware of Hoffman for his supporting roles in Hollywood vehicles — as a tornado-chaser in Twister, a sleazy journalist in Red Dragon or Ben Stiller’s sweaty chum in Along Came Polly. Either that or they were wondering why he didn’t fit into his tux properly.
Sartorial elegance is not his forte. When we meet, he looks ragged. Dressed in a creased check shirt and grey trousers, he is the polar opposite to Capote. His straw-blond hair is matted, not slicked back, and he has swapped Capote’s black-rimmed glasses for oblong wire-thin ones. With his chin no longer clean-shaven, but covered with a thick orange-red beard, his ruddy complexion suggests that he ran up the stairs and into that pillar. Some 6in taller than the 5ft 3in Capote, he appears to have put back on most of the 40lb he lost to play the role. A wrestler as a teenager, he looks strong enough to put you in a headlock if you asked an overly personal question.
Serious, deliberate, twitchy even, Hoffman, 38, strikes you as a man uncomfortable in his skin, too. His best characters are often socially awkward creatures: the repressed homosexual Scotty J in Boogie Nights, the sex pest Allen in Happiness, the playboy Freddie Miles in The Talented Mr Ripley. Alongside his idol, Sean Penn, he is the most fearless performer of his generation. “There is no vanity in him as an actor,” says Bennett Miller, the director of Capote, who has known Hoffman for two decades.
Miller’s film is not the first time he’s played flamboyant — in Flawless his turn as a drag queen was just that. Nor is it the first time he’s taken on a real-life figure; his rock critic Lester Bangs was the highlight of Almost Famous. It’s not his first lead either: in Love Liza, written by his elder brother Gordy, he played a grief-stricken website designer, while Owning Mahowny cast him as a banker with a gambling problem.
But this was the first time Hoffman assimilated all of the above, making Capote “the toughest job I’ve taken on”. As he puffs away on a Lucky Strike, I’m reminded just how delicate his portrayal is of Capote, who would never hold a cigarette in such a furtive way. But Hoffman does not merely emulate Capote’s arsenal of effete gestures. “Phil doesn’t have it in his constitution to be false,” says Miller. “He’s always aiming at something that transcends the particulars of the persona.”
The film details the six-year period when Capote wrote In Cold Blood, his gripping account, published in 1965, of the 1959 murder of a Kansas family, and focuses on the writer’s complex relationship with the two killers. As they wait on Death Row, Capote exploits their desperation for the sake of his trailblazing work. “It’s a high-stakes Faustian bargain that he makes,” says Hoffman. “And it kind of destroyed him.”
The irony of Capote for Hoffman is that playing a man who adored celebrity has turned him into one. While he lives quietly in a Manhattan apartment with Mimi O’Donnell, a costume designer, and their two-year-old son, he knows this idyllic set-up may now be intruded upon. “Until you’ve lost your anonymity you don’t know what that means,” he says. “But I’ve been losing it over a long period of time, so it’s been a gradual road for me. This is just another step, if a big one.”
He is intensely private. “I’d rather not talk about my private life because my family doesn’t have any choice,” he says, visibly stiffening. “If I talk about them in the press I’m giving them no choice. So I choose not to.”
Hoffman says that “becoming too exposed can never be helpful to an actor”, preferring to hide his personal life so that audiences don’t mistake him for his characters. Even his name is not his own; he added the Seymour — his grandfather’s name — because US Equity had another Philip Hoffman on its books.
His upstate New York upbringing was equally anonymous, “somewhere between white trash and affluence”. His parents divorced when he was young; his father worked for Xerox, his mother, who brought him up, was a lawyer with staunch feminist views. Hoffman spent much of his teenage years battling against her, “because my image of being a man was deformed”.
After an injury to his neck cut his wrestling career short, Hoffman decided to try acting. School plays led to a place at New York’s Tisch School of the Arts before he started to win film roles — notably opposite Al Pacino in 1992’s Scent of a Woman.
He recently confessed to a spell in rehab during this time, although now he seems more addicted to politics than stimulants. “My mother was big in the Democratic Party in our community,” he says. “People would come and speak in the backyard. I rebelled against it.”
If there’s still something insubordinate about Hoffman, this summer he will be toeing the party line, playing the villain opposite Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible 3. He took the role because, as with Miller, he has known the director J. J. Abrams (the creator of the TV series Lost) since his early twenties. “He’s trying to do something different with a franchise movie, and that's not easy,” Hoffman says.
Even for a natural risk-taker exposing himself to the level of fame such a film can bring seems like the greatest gamble of all. Is Capote a last nod to his maverick ways?
He shakes his head. “If you get too mainstream, your options close off,” he says. “I live on the fringe between independent and big budget films. I like where I am. I like it that my options are open.”
The weirdest tales of Philip Seymour Hoffman
Allen, a squirming, obscene phone-caller in Todd Solondz’s film Happiness, which features an explicit masturbation scene.
Scotty J, a bungling, repressed homosexual in the porn satire Boogie Nights, who lusts after star Mark Wahlberg.
Lester Bangs, the gonzo rock journalist in Almost Famous.
Freddie Miles, the Ivy League frat boy in The Talented Mr Ripley who sees through Matt Damon’s con-artist.
Rusty Zimmerman, a tortured drag queen in Flawless.
