“The Long Walk” star Cooper Hoffman has opened up about following in the footsteps of his late father Philip Seymour Hoffman, whom the young star called his “favorite actor.”
Hoffman, who made his screen acting debut in 2021’s “Licorice Pizza,” told GQ in an interview published Tuesday that he originally planned on avoiding Hollywood and acting altogether. “I wanted to do everything but act, basically,” he revealed, noting that he considered becoming a fashion designer instead. “I wanted to go to, like, Central Saint Martins.”
The actor understandably could not think about acting without thinking about his father, who remains one of the most revered performers of his generation, despite passing away 11 years ago in 2014 when his son was just 10 years old. It was ultimately “Licorice Pizza” writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson, who worked multiple times with Hoffman’s father, who convinced him to give acting a shot.
Several years later, Hoffman has emerged, thanks to his performances in projects like “Licorice Pizza” and “Saturday Night,” as one of Hollywood’s rising stars. As he prepared earlier this year to perform in an off-Broadway revival of Sam Shepard’s “Curse of the Starving Class,” though, Hoffman told GQ that he found himself thinking about his father again.
“The only person I really wanted to talk to was my dad,” he said. “He’s my favorite actor, but he’s also my dad. He’s also not here.”
“A lot of people idolize their parents because they’re great parents,” Hoffman continued. “It’s a different thing to idolize your parent because you love their art. So as much as I would love him to be here and talk to him about acting, I also would be terrified to have him see my stuff and judge my stuff. Not that he would judge it, because he was a very empathetic person, and he would probably—hopefully—hold my hand through all of it.”
In his new film, director Francis Lawrence’s Stephen King adaptation “The Long Walk,” Hoffman plays a young man grieving the sudden loss of his father. The parallels between him and his character were not lost on Hoffman, who was asked by GQ whether or not he had any apprehensions about taking on the role.
“Oh my God, how can you not?” Hoffman responded. “How can you not see in bold letters, ‘HIS DAD DIED’? It’s just going to be there.”
Hoffman tried to intentionally botch his audition for “The Long Walk” by reading his lines from his phone instead of memorizing them, but the act of self-sabotage did not work. In the end, Hoffman decided it might be worthwhile to explore some of his own, personal feelings of grief onscreen.
“When your trauma is on display for the world, there’s no actually hiding it,” the young star explained. “I’m like, I might as well talk about it, or, I might as well put it into something. Because if I keep hiding it and running from it, that’s not fair to anyone else who has gone through that. I’m here to display this person and this experience as honestly as I can, and hopefully someone else watches it and goes, ‘He sees me, he understands me.’ And that’s, in my opinion, the only reason to do any sort of art.”
“I get to figure this out on my own,” Hoffman added, reflecting further on walking the same career path as his father. “But also, I would love his advice. And I would also just love my dad.”
“The Long Walk” is set to hit theaters on Sept. 12.
