Acting lessons

Before I met Philip Seymour Hoffman, I thought acting was pretty simple.

I WAS THRILLED when a Hungarian movie producer, who for years had been trying to turn a nonfiction book I’d written, Stung, into a feature film, phoned to tell me that Philip Seymour Hoffman had agreed to play the lead and that the financing had finally come together. Better yet: the movie, about a young banker and compulsive gambler, would be shot mostly in Toronto, where I lived at the time.

I was also thrilled that Philip wanted to meet me and talk about the character he’d play. We met soon after he arrived to shoot Owning Mahowny. No one else recognized him in the hotel lobby. He’d already turned heads with his unforgettable performances in Boogie Nights and The Talented Mr. Ripley, but he wasn’t widely known yet, and he had that weird quality some actors do of being nobody and everybody at once. (Way back when, I ran into Brad Pitt and Jennifer Anniston together in a red Mustang convertible. They’d lost their way on a dirt road on an old sugar plantation on Kauai. They were the exact opposite of Philip: unmistakably radiant movie stars from half a mile away.)

Luckily, Philip saw me not as a journalist who’d ask dumb questions but as someone who could give him insight into his character, who was defrauding the bank to feed a gambling addiction. Philip flattered me by saying my book is what persuaded him to take the role; I wasn’t flattering him when I said that the film had been in development, off and on, for more than a decade, but came together only when he signed on. Even then, before he was famous, the acting world knew he was special.

Philip told me a bit about himself, asked me about myself, and peppered me with questions about Brian, the banker and gambler—his family, upbringing, his habits, his personality, what he liked to eat for lunch. (Answer: Swiss Chalet chicken.) He asked how I’d sum Brian up in a sentence.

“Actually, believe it or not, I’d say he’s one of the most principled and trustworthy people I’ve met. Seriously. Fraud and former gambling addiction notwithstanding.”

I asked Philip what had appealed to him about the role. He said, “Brian’s story isn’t altogether foreign territory for me.”

He wanted to meet Brian, who had pled guilty to fraud and received a six-year sentence, long since served. I called Brian and he agreed, so Philip took a limo out to Brian’s suburban office and they spent three or four hours together. I’d love to have been a fly on the wall as they took each other’s measure. I do know that both men came away intrigued and impressed.

BEFORE I MET Philip, I imagined that acting was fairly simple—especially film acting, with its erasable takes. You feign being someone else. You imagine yourself into a story, a set of circumstances unlike your own. You memorize a script—verbal clues to this life you pretend to inhabit—and you recite your lines with all the conviction and honesty you can muster.

I next saw Philip later that week, on the set in downtown Toronto. He’d become a character—Dan, in the movie—that uncannily incorporated the actual Brian. It was as if Philip had psychically downloaded him. The character’s shoulders had risen an inch. His gait had become splay-footed. His moustache disguised his upper lip as he issued banker-type instructions with a sort of bored authority. He even sighed the way Brian, whom I’d interviewed for many weeks, sighed in exasperation.

In the scene being shot that afternoon, Philip and Minnie Driver, his love interest, played off each other. Between takes, Minnie fussed over hair and makeup and costume while Philip sat in a corner, inviolable, staring at the floor. Take six: once again, she knocks meekly on his office door. “Dan, I’ve brought your coat.” He pauses, three beats, before showing her in. Take seven: “Dan, I’ve brought your coat.”

A few days later, a casino scene was being shot very late at night. The set was a second-rate hotel near the airport in Toronto. The entrance had been tricked out to resemble a casino entrance. On set, for the entire thirty-eight-day shoot, it was understood that you must not speak to Philip or make eye contact. He stayed in character during the interminable adjustments between takes, hands thrust into suit pockets, pacing back and forth in the lobby, using a forefinger to nudge his glasses up the bridge of his nose. He was a self-enclosed bell jar; the crystalline air of concentration was palpable.

That night, a fifteen-second scene was filmed over and over again: Philip walking out to a limousine where John Hurt, playing a sleazy casino boss, waits to hand him ribs in a Styrofoam box. Take six. Take seven. Eight. Nine. Philip brought to each take an almost undetectable new inflection—a hesitation, a change in vocal pitch, a glance at the box. Then he went back inside to pace in silence, and wait. Hurt, meanwhile, loquacious and fun-loving, a born raconteur, chatted with crew members, sucked fiercely on cigarettes, and told stories about Ireland, where he lived.

By the time filming ended, at 3:30 a.m., everyone was exhausted. Shooting was set to resume less than seven hours later, in Niagara Falls, more than 100 kilometres away. Day after arduous day, the schedule made filming a movie seem like some kind of deranged ironman competition.

Philip Seymour Hoffman as a banker (and compulsive gambler) in “Owning Mahowny”

I AGAIN VISITED the set, in downtown Toronto, the following week. Seeing a film shot out of sequence (Minnie could spend only the first two weeks of principal photography in Toronto) helped me appreciate the incredible focus that acting demands: We’re shooting this closing scene now, which means everything important has already happened, though we’ve not yet shot everything important. How do you find the emotional pitch demanded by a climactic moment without having worked yourself up to it?

Minnie seemed to turn it on and off at will. Philip’s total immersion, his grasp of moral and emotional nuance, left at least a couple of the other actors in awe. Maury Chaykin, who plays a bookmaker in the movie, told me he’d turned down a major part in another film, against his agent’s wishes, because he’d have multiple scenes with Philip Seymour Hoffman.

AT THE END of a film shoot, there’s a wrap party. People who’ve come from far and wide to work together—hauling cables, changing lenses, applying makeup, driving rental cars, making food, amending scripts, adjusting lights, loading cameras, rearranging sets, pretending to be characters they are not—get drunk together and celebrate the completion of something irreplicable.

The party for Owning Mahowny was at a cavernous place on Adelaide Street. Philip had promised we’d talk there, but all night he was surrounded by the crew, to whom he had plainly endeared himself. He was relaxed and upbeat and drank only ginger ale. Drivers waited outside, and at midnight we shared a car up to Bloor Street. He apologized for not having chatted, gave me his number, and suggested I look him up next time I was in New York.

I did so, rather sheepishly, a couple of months later. When I called and asked whether, busy as he was, he was willing to meet for coffee, he said, “Of course. I don’t say things like that just to be polite.” We met for lunch at a little spot in Greenwich Village, close to where he lived, and I asked him about his craft.

“Is it a natural gift, becoming someone else? Like being able to do long division in your head? Or learning Mandarin in a few months?”

“It’s really hard work,” he said. “Every time. It’s exhausting.”

“The way therapy is hard work? The work of getting to the heart of things?”

“The thing is, if you don’t leave it all out there, it’s not going to be very good.”

“How do you locate in yourself so many different people?” I asked.

I didn’t understand his answer: “You have to look in the mirror every single day and not be afraid of what you see.”

THE LAST TIME I saw Philip, we met for lunch at another place in the Village. It was a muggy spring day. He arrived on his bicycle, wearing baggy camouflage shorts and a ratty orange T-shirt. He locked his bike to a lamp post. This was pre-Capote, before the best actor Oscar made him a household name. Still, diners did a double-take as we sat down: I know him, I just can’t remember who he is.

His work on Owning Mahowny was complete. Since we’d last spoken he’d done some looping (redoing dialogue to match film that’s been shot), but he hadn’t yet seen the final cut. He asked whether I had.

“I had my own screening. I saw it in this empty theatre on Bloor Street at noon. Looking at daily rushes gives you no idea what to expect.”

“What did you think?”

Apart from the odd jolt—feeling that John Hurt was overdoing it, or that Minnie Driver was trying awfully hard to nail a Canadian accent—I’d been transfixed at the screening. The film was far better than I’d expected. Emotion flooded over me. Philip watched me intently as I struggled to answer. “Holy fuck,” I said, “I wept.”

“That’s a good sign.”

Philip told me about a low-budget film his brother had written, Love Liza, in which he plays a character who, after being visited by grief, gets addicted to gasoline fumes. He said he was rehearsing a play with his off-Broadway company and preparing to fly to Los Angeles, a city he didn’t much like, for a film shoot and a handsome payday.

I asked about the difference between film and stage. He said that what happens onstage on a good night has no parallel, it’s the purest high, the tightrope artist making it all the way across while the crowd below holds its breath and then goes “Oooooohh.” I had a daughter, Philip and his partner were contemplating parenthood, and he asked what I liked most about being a father. I said that having a kid has no parallel, it’s the absolute purest love.

Lunch over, Philip insisted on paying before discovering he didn’t have any money. Outside, he unlocked his bike and pedaled off, a circus bear on a bicycle, raising a hand without looking back.

THERE’S A SCENE in Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead—a wonderful but often overlooked Sidney Lumet film—in which Philip’s character, who plays a jewel thief, gets tied off and injected before delivering a woozy, zonked-out self-assessment: “All of my parts,” he says, “don’t add up to . . . one me.”

I remember asking him, before shooting began on Owning Mahowny, what he’d found in Brian that corresponded to something in himself, a footing he could build on to create the character of a compulsive gambler.

“I had some times when I was young,” he said. “I know how you can fool the people around you—even people who know you well—into thinking you’re okay. You can fool yourself, too.”

P. S. Philip Seymour Hoffman died in Manhattan of combined drug intoxication in 2014. He was 46. The obit in the New York Times referred to him as “perhaps the most ambitious and widely admired American actor of his generation.”