Philip Seymour Hoffman - Lights! Camera! The Movies' Mandate for Change - Interview

Interview, Feb, 1999 by Patrick Giles

Philip Seymour Hoffman has a remarkable face. One look at it and you know that, contrary to rumor, movies haven't lost their genius for discovering actors who are capable of being themselves while occupying the spirit of another person and mirroring the secrets and desires of everyone watching in the dark. Hoffman's is not a stereotypically Hollywood-handsome face; you need to live with it to discover its magic. It dates back to an era when male movie stars didn't all have to look like Brads or Matts. It's a face enough like our own faces to be recognizable, yet so vividly unique you can't take your eyes off it.

In the past, James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, and even John Wayne helped men confront who they were and why they were. The thirty-one-year-old Hoffman, on the brink of a major career, shares that quality, but in an era when manhood itself is under the gun. His character's sudden desperate kiss with the porn star played by Mark Wahlberg in Boogie Nights (1997) is one of those great but terrible screen moments when love and reality collide. Hoffman's lonely, mortifying performance in Happiness (1998), meanwhile, was the key to that harrowing study of alienation and irresolvable needs. Onscreen, Hoffman is the prototypical '90s male: questioning, even baffled, but determined to get to the bottom of himself by any means necessary.

PATRICK GILES: Let's begin with the scene where you kissed Mark Wahlberg in Boogie Nights. A friend of mine said after seeing that, "Boy, if I had Phil Hoffman's role, I would have messed up as many takes as possible!"

PHILIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN: [laughs] That scene couldn't have been more natural. When we came to do it, Paul [Thomas Anderson, writer-director of Boogie Nights] said to Mark, "Don't reject him on the first two takes," but he didn't tell me. So at first Mark was coming at me and it was very wild because the thought of my character. Scotty J., getting what he wanted was much scarier than being rejected. It's like, when you get what you want, what are you going to do with it? In the end, Paul was more interested in finding the sadness in Scotty. Anyway, Mark and I kissed a lot that evening.

PG: Now Scotty seemed to me to be hesitant about his sexuality but the character you play in Flawless, the upcoming Joel Schumacher film, is a gay man and a "pre-op" transsexual, right?

PSH: Yes. Rusty's this guy who works as a seamstress and he's also a drag performer who coaches the other queens who sing at this club. He dreams of becoming a woman, but he's not on hormones or anything. He's not totally comfortable with the term drag queen because he doesn't think it applies to him. His ultimate goal is to be married to a straight man.

PG: To be Donna Reed or something.

PSH: Exactly. To make dinner and have adopted children that he makes lunch for and sends off to school - what he himself obviously didn't have growing up. He wants to be accepted within some type of normality and, in his secret heart, it's the straight world he considers normal.

PG: What happens to him?

PSH: He hooks up with a heterosexual man, played by Robert De Niro, who lives in his building. Bob's character has a stroke and his doctor says he needs to start taking voice therapy, but he's too scared to leave the building, so he comes to me for voice lessons and is forced to deal with who I am. Bob's character is somebody who's very proud of being a man, having a good body, hanging with his straight friends and drinking beer, watching the game. Anything that's outside of that is very threatening to him, so his sense of J-can-kick-your-ass machismo is met head-on by this guy who thinks he's a woman, In a way, it's a kind of love story, although they barely touch each other and I wouldn't say they even become great friends. By the end, though, you see that they have respect for each other and have found more similarities than differences between them.

PG: Interview is dedicating this whole issue to the evolution of masculinity in the last thirty years. It sounds like you might have gone into that subject a lot doing this movie.

PSH: Yes, I did. I think men straggle with their masculinity more in today's culture than they have done in the past. I can't speak for the rest of my generation but I know that for me, growing up, the question "What does it mean to be a man?" was very sketchy. Flawless does approach those issues because you're dealing with one guy who has lost his sense of masculinity and another guy who doesn't think he ever had it.

PG: How did you play someone who never felt masculine?

PSH: It seems to me that guys like the one I play go out of their way to try to be feminine, so I had to work on the fact that their physical behavior and vocal behavior is all very intentional and becomes a part of them. That's different from the average effeminate man you might meet on the street. So I approached it by asking myself, What is it like to be something you're not?

PG: Were there moments when you thought, I am totally at sea and don't understand this at all? PSH: I always knew where I needed to go but I sometimes had a problem getting there, so I had to work harder at it. Once in a while I'd wanna take off the blouse and heels because I'd get that "I just wanna be a guy" feeling I had when I was growing up. But what is that? Does that mean that my legs aren't crossed? Does that mean I sit with a little slouch, my elbows are on my knees, and I lower my voice? Now am I guy? Now do you accept me as a guy guy? It was weird.