More than a decade after his father Philip Seymour Hoffman‘s death, Cooper Hoffman‘s latest role put his grief on full display.
The Golden Globe nominee, who plays Raymond Garraty in Francis Lawrence‘s adaptation of Stephen King‘s The Long Walk, admitted “how can you not” see the similarities between himself and the role of a young man motivated by his late father to enter the titular race.
“When you experience death at a young age, you think that you’ve experienced everything in life. And then you haven’t,” he explained in an interview with GQ.
“When your trauma is on display for the world, there’s no actually hiding it. I’m like, I might as well talk about it, or, I might as well put it into something,” added Hoffman. “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.”
In The Long Walk, premiering Sept. 12 in theaters, a group of young men enter an annual walking contest in dystopian America, in which the losers are executed and only one person survives.
David Jonsson, Cooper Hoffman, Jordan Gonzalez, Ben Wang and Tut Nyuot in ‘The Long Walk’ (2025) (Murray Close/Lionsgate/Courtesy Everett Collection)
Following Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death at age 46 in 2014, Cooper made his onscreen debut starring in family friend Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza (2021), which earned him a Golden Globe nomination. He’s since starred in Wildcat (2023), Old Guy (2024) and Saturday Night (2024), in addition to several upcoming projects.
While appearing earlier this year in an off-Broadway revival of Sam Shepard’s Curse of the Starving Class, Cooper felt “so ill-prepared for this,” recalling, “The only person I really wanted to talk to was my dad.”
“He’s my favorite actor, but he’s also my dad. He’s also not here,” he continued. “A lot of people idolize their parents because they’re great parents. 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.”
Cooper added, “I get to figure this out on my own. But also, I would love his advice. And I would also just love my dad.”
