Philip Seymour Hoffman: 'Fame isn't the reason why I act'

His latest role as a hypochondriac facing a mid-life crisis is arguably Philip Seymour Hoffman's most ambitious to date. But nothing fazes him more than the pitfalls of stardom, finds James Mottram

If there's one role Philip Seymour Hoffman will never play, it's that of the Hollywood star. Just take his ensemble today: with his thatch of straw-coloured hair in desperate need of a comb, he's dressed in a tight brown T-shirt that allows his belly to spill over his dark slacks. Hardly flattering, yet it shows just how he's the very antithesis of your average A-lister. Winning an Oscar for his portrayal of Truman Capote two years ago, Hoffman may have subsequently got to play the villain opposite Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible 3 but he was never going to sell out to Hollywood. This year alone has seen him play a conceited academic in The Savages, a foolhardy real-estate executive in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead and a caustic CIA agent in Charlie Wilson's War – hardly what you'd call star vehicles.

This is not exactly news to fans of Hoffman's work. From his sex pest in Happiness to his flamboyant drag queen in Flawless and his rich-kid playboy in The Talented Mr Ripley, the 41 -year-old actor has delivered some of the most remarkably risky performances of the past decade. But even a man of Hoffman's integrity is not immune to the way success breeds celebrity. "You don't ever think you'll be famous," he says, "But all of a sudden you're 29 and somebody stares at you in a restaurant and you think they don't like you or they want to fight you or you know them and you forgot their name. Then you realise they saw your movie and they know you. And that's shocking. It's like losing your left arm."

To illustrate just how alien it feels to him, he cites William Goldman's 1991 book, Hype and Glory, which dealt with a year in the screenwriter's life when he was on both the Cannes jury and helped choose Miss America. "He said this thing about when actors become actors they know what they're getting into. I read that and thought, 'Oh God, that's so not true!' It's just categorically false. Yeah, I'm sure there's a group of actors that do know, that want to be in the movies and want to be movie stars. But there's a whole bunch of us that got into acting because we went to our regional theatres and saw All My Sons. That's what I thought was going to be my life. I had no idea I was going to be on a screen."

As it happens, Hoffman's first experience of the theatre was seeing a production of the aforementioned Arthur Miller play, which his mother took him to. A lawyer with staunch feminist views, she raised Hoffman, his two sisters (now a midwife and healthcare instructor) and his elder brother Gordy (a playwright who directed Hoffman in the film Love Liza) alone, after she divorced their father, a Xerox employee. At the time, Hoffman had little interest in acting. A "total jock" at school, he preferred sports, playing baseball, football and even wrestling. But after a neck injury in the ring forced him to quit, under doctor's orders, he turned to acting – with the added motivation that a girl he had a crush on was in the school play.

Later graduating from New York University's Tisch School of Drama, Hoffman's stayed in theatre ever since. He is co-artistic director for the highly regarded off-Broadway company LAByrinth. "We've been producing new work for the last 14 years," he explains. "So hopefully we're creating some writers that people will use in the future. That's our goal."

While Hoffman found great success when he directed Jesus Hopped the A-Train in London's West End in 2002, it was not the case recently when he brought Riflemind to the Trafalgar Studios. Written by Cate Blanchett's husband, Andrew Upton, Hoffman had first directed the play in Sydney but when it came to London, it was forced to close at the end of October, two months before it was due to finish.

Ironically, this comes just as his role as Caden Cotard, the neurotic theatre director in Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York, has been receiving ecstatic reviews in the US ("mesmerising," said Rolling Stone). One of three forthcoming films Hoffman can be seen in, it's arguably his most ambitious performance to date. He seems delighted to have worked with Kaufman, the screenwriter behind Being John Malkovich and Adaptation who makes his directorial debut here, and the feeling is mutual. Kaufman admits he couldn't think of anyone else to play the role. "Phil feeds everything into his character. That's all I can say. Everything is very felt. He's just honest and he needs to find that. That's the work I do with him and he does with himself, is to try to find that."

Set in the New York borough of Schenectady, this increasingly dense and ambiguous tale begins with the hypochondriac Caden enduring a mid-life crisis as his marriage to abstract artist Adele (Catherine Keener) falls apart. But as the film unfurls, and Caden

devotes his life to staging his magnum opus, a performance art piece that sees him house a scale-model of Manhattan in a warehouse, this crisis becomes a full-scale meltdown. With Caden's anxieties escalating, it's something Hoffman sees as very universal. "I think there is neurosis around the world. People are anxious. People get scared. People are worried about dying. People get their hearts broken. That's what the film's about."

A father of three, with his partner of 10 years, costume designer Mimi O' Donnell, Hoffman admits the film – which sees him age more than 30 years – made him think about getting older. "Being 40 and having a child, that's not being 30 – in a huge way," he argues. "In a much bigger way than being 30 was to being 20. You know what I mean? And we'd talk about that. And how time starts to get really fucked up. And it does, it does. It's so fast now. I can't imagine what it's going to be like when I'm 70." So how does he feel when he sees his earlier work? He grimaces at the thought. "If Scent of a Woman is on TV or something and I'll come across it, it's unbearable. It makes you want to weep. You're like, 'Yeah, I was young!'"

Curiously, by the time Hoffman made 1992's Scent of a Woman, when he was 25, he had already been through rehab for substance abuse. "It was all that [drugs and alcohol]," he told US programme 60 Minutes. "It was anything I could get my hands on... I liked it all. You get panicked... and I got panicked for my life."

He admits he's glad such pitfalls happened to him before he became well known. "I have so much empathy for these young actors that are 19 and all of a sudden they're beautiful, famous and rich. I'm like, 'Oh my God, I'd be dead.'" Instead, he went on to build his career – and his fame – by taking small but noticeable roles in films like the Coens' The Big Lebowski and Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights.

Gradually gathering kudos for virtually every role he took, in many ways it was no surprise that Hoffman won an Oscar at the first time of asking. While he notes the win for Capote "wasn't so much of a surprise" by the time it happened, given that he'd already won a Bafta, Golden Globe and Independent Spirit Award, he's not afraid to admit that Oscar night was a "terrifying" experience. "Getting up in front of a 100 million people... you can't imagine the fear! It's fear like I never thought. You don't get up there in joy. You get up there in absolute terror. Like I'm going to say something really stupid and everyone in the world will hear it – you can't get over that thought."

Already Hoffman – who received his second Oscar nomination for Charlie Wilson's War this year – is being touted as a contender for Best Supporting Actor at the 2009 Oscars, for his role in Doubt. Based on John Patrick Shanley's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, the film sees Hoffman playing a Catholic priest in the Bronx in the 1960s accused by a nun (played by Meryl Streep) of abusing a black pupil. "It's a film that stays true to what was quite upsetting about the play: the unknown and the doubt that we all live with, and don't really want to," says Hoffman. "It's kind of like seeing Synecdoche!"

Hoffman has also been in England shooting a role in The Boat That Rocked, the new comedy from Richard Curtis that casts him as The Count, a brash American DJ on a 1960s pirate radio station. Though not his first brush with mainstream cinema – he's popped up in everything from Red Dragon to Along Came Polly – the thought of Hoffman working with the middle-of-the-road man behind Notting Hill hardly whets the appetite. But it's typical of him to defy expectations like this. "I don't think about parts I should play," he tells me. "They just come when they come." An actor operating on instinct, you just can't second-guess Hoffman.

'Doubt' opens on 6 February; 'Synecdoche, New York' and 'The Boat That Rocked' will open in May

Source: independent.co.uk