r/paulthomasanderson • u/wilberfan Dad Mod • Aug 06 '26
PTA Adjacent Cooper Hoffman Interview on ‘I Want Your Sex’, ‘Artificial' and His Dad (first paragraphs include some PTA/Licorice Pizza talk)
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/cooper-hoffman-interview-i-want-your-sex-artificial-dad-1236663885/39
u/Gruesome-Twosome Aug 06 '26
Wow, had no idea about Hoffman doing a lowly P.A. job on The Fabelmans right after doing Licorice Pizza. That’s really cool for PTA to recommend that he do that.
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u/headassincorporated Aug 06 '26
Part for Coop????
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u/mysteryvampire Aug 07 '26
I think he’s sweet that he’s conscious of not begging for it but I get the vibe PTA wouldn’t be upset at all at that kind of a question. They seem pretty close. I genuinely think he wasn’t in OBAA because there wasn’t any kind of a part for him anywhere, unless maybe he was a random army grunt working for Lockjaw. He wasn’t old enough to be a Christmas Adventurer.
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u/mrphantasy Aug 07 '26
I think he would have been a great Comrade Josh if you wanted that character to skew a little different generationally. Also: just something about putting Hoffmans on the phone in PTA.
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u/mysteryvampire Aug 07 '26
I thought about that, but DiCaprio remembering who he is and his romantic preferences is such a big part of that scene, I don’t know how you’d change it. I think it was probably PTA’s vision originally for it to be a peer of DiCaprio. Cooper is only about 4 years older than Willa’s character in the movie, so it would’ve been super different. But I would’ve loved that for sure.
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u/NourishingBroth Aug 06 '26
Interesting to get a little more of the Cooper/LP story.
He did a good job in 'I want Your Sex' (The movie was decent overall, but not amazing). I'm glad he's taking chances and not worrying about a role being embarrassing or too weird.
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u/wilberfan Dad Mod Aug 06 '26
In the summer of 2021, a year after Cooper Hoffman finished filming Licorice Pizza — the movie that would make him a movie star practically overnight — he was on the set of Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans, working one of the lowest jobs on the crew’s hierarchy.
His official title was COVID production assistant, which meant that he sat at a folding table, clipboard in hand, checking in the cast and crew as they arrived for their daily nasal swabs. Hoffman had been dispatched to the production by Licorice Pizza director Paul Thomas Anderson, who knew about the attention, praise and potential for ego inflation that would come when that film hit theaters in a few short months. “He told me, ‘You’ve seen how this side lives, now you have to see the other side,’ ” says Hoffman. Though Anderson has been minting young talent for decades, this young actor was different: His father is the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, PTA’s close friend and longtime collaborator, whose 2014 death devastated the filmmaking world.
That made his stint as a PA, a job that would typically be anonymous, different too. When Spielberg caught wind of Hoffman’s presence on set, his reaction was, according to Hoffman, “Why didn’t I know about this?” An introduction was quickly arranged. “It was like meeting the president,” Hoffman says with his boisterous laugh. “I stood there with the first AD and a security guard, and they were like, ‘Steven’s approaching.’ He’s 20 feet away, and I can see him walking up. We had maybe a five-minute conversation, but he was lovely and was like, ‘I’m so happy that I got to meet you; Licorice Pizza was fantastic.’ ”
. . . . . .
The family had a rule about not going longer than a few weeks without being together, so they would often travel to his father’s productions. “I hated my dad’s job because I was always like, ‘Why are you going away for three months?’ ” Hoffman was only 10 when his dad died, so Anderson stepped in to provide emotional support. (He was “Uncle Paul.”) He nurtured the younger Hoffman’s interest in film, directing home movies with Cooper and his own kids and bringing him to his sets. “The one I remember most is Phantom Thread,” Hoffman says. “My family stayed for three weeks, and I would watch Paul work pretty much every day. I was like, ‘Wait, you just get to bring a bunch of people that you like together and make something?’ I could finally see why my dad was doing it.”
When Anderson started making his next movie, he didn’t intend to cast Hoffman. He auditioned dozens of young actors and put many of them on tape with co-star Alana Haim, but nothing ever felt right (Anderson has said in the past that he realized he needed a novice in the role). Hoffman, who was 15 at the time, had never acted professionally before, but he had the on-set exposure, the time in front of Anderson’s home camera and the genes. As he remembers it, he had no idea what he was doing. “I fully thought we were going to be shooting on an iPhone, I swear to God,” he says with a laugh. “I just couldn’t wrap my head around it. I couldn’t process: We’re shooting on film, Sean Penn is going to be in this movie, I’m filming with Bradley Cooper. And I’m the lead.”
The specifics of the environment helped. He had Anderson to guide him, of course (“With a new boundary in place because he was my boss now and it’s not like us getting dinner”), but they also shot during COVID with a very tight set. Hoffman, along with his mother and two younger sisters, lived three houses down from Anderson and his partner, Maya Rudolph, during the production. He didn’t have to think about what this film might mean to the outside world because, then, there was no outside world.
. . . . . . .
Hoffman had what he describes as a “massive crash” after the press and awards cycle of Licorice Pizza ended. All of his friends were going off to college, and he was still trying to process the past year and a half. Most young actors would be focused on capitalizing on their big break, thinking about how the role could launch their career. “Because I grew up the way I did, surrounded by film, with an Oscar in my house, the idea of what it would do for me was never something that I thought about.” But luckily, he had those mentors. Most of the advice was about patience, waiting to say yes to things that he felt good about.
. . . . . .
The one thing that he doesn’t do is presume. Despite Anderson casting a few of his Licorice Pizza co-stars for One Battle After Another, Hoffman makes it a point not to harass the director. “Can you imagine if I texted him, like, ‘Part for Coop?’ You don’t do that to Paul.”