Character Assimilation

Philip Seymour Hoffman looks like he hasn’t been sleeping well, perhaps because a doctor has told him that vocal-cord polyps--and not a simple cold--are what have been plaguing him for the past couple of weeks while performing in the off-Broadway play “Shopping and F------” by Mark Ravenhill.

“Yeah, he’s this $1,000-an-hour guy--and it’s crazy, because he handles all the singers and actors in town, but he doesn’t take our insurance,” Hoffman says, as he dumps a generous dollop of honey into a cup of herbal tea. “And he’s saying that these polyps should just go away but, if they don’t, he’ll need to biopsy them. Then he says, ‘But don’t lose any sleep over it.’ So I’m trying not to--but, honestly, I’m a little scared.”

Then again, Hoffman’s fear level can be a funny thing. He is, after all, a guy who got into acting only after suffering a career-ending neck injury as a high-school wrestler in Fairport, N.Y.--then spending months lying about the pain caused by separated vertebrae in his neck for fear of the treatment.

“They wanted to operate and then wanted to put my head in one of those halo braces--and I thought that would be so embarrassing that I just couldn’t face it,” he says. “So I lied about how much it hurt and just lived with the injury.”

So Hoffman, 30, is eager to get his throat back in full working order. Even as he finishes the run of “Shopping and F------” he’s heading off to appear opposite Robin Williams in Tom Shadyac’s “Patch Adams,” which begins shooting a week later.

Meanwhile, he has finished four films, the first of which, the Coen brothers’ “The Big Lebowski,” opened last month. Still awaiting release: Brad Anderson’s “Next Stop, Wonderland” and Jennifer Leitzes’ “Montana” (both of which screened at this year’s Sundance Film Festival), and the new, as-yet-untitled film by Todd Solondz (“Welcome to the Dollhouse”).

If you’re having trouble placing Hoffman, based on his name or even his picture, think of him in a too-tight tank top, his pink belly peeking over the top of his corduroy jeans, desperately planting a big, wet kiss on Mark Wahlberg’s lips in “Boogie Nights.”

Squint a little and you conjure him up as the tornado-chasing equivalent of an exuberant Deadhead in “Twister.” Imagine him a few pounds lighter and you might remember him as one of the snotty preppies who tormented Chris O’Donnell in “Scent of a Woman.”

If you don’t recognize him, however, that would make Hoffman even happier. He’s winning more good parts than ever (though he still has to audition to get them), but he’d rather people focus on the character than notice the acting.

“If I do a lot of different things, people aren’t watching the actor--they’re watching the character,” Hoffman says. “There are a lot of great actors who, after a while, well, you’re watching the actor, no matter what character it is. I want to try for as long as possible to have people watch my characters, not me.”

So he hops from character role to character role, playing everything from the tragically adoring Scotty in “Boogie Nights” to a prissily officious personal assistant in “The Big Lebowski” to an exhausted drug addict trying to rediscover his own feelings in “Shopping and F------.” What keeps landing him the roles is his willingness to submerge his own ego in characters who are trying to cope with their own inner damage.

Director Joel Coen recalls of Hoffman’s “Big Lebowski” audition, “We didn’t know his work but, when we met him, he was very, very funny. He was doing that fussy Young Republican thing close to what you see in the movie--constantly patting his clothes, almost like he was checking to see if his body was still there.”

Adds Ethan Coen: “We didn’t see ‘Boogie Nights’ until after his audition, and it was remarkable to see the two performances next to each other. They couldn’t possibly have been more different. It turned out I had noticed him in ‘Hard Eight’ and didn’t even realize it was Phil.”

Hoffman recalls the auditions slightly differently: “It’s the Coen brothers, and you never think you’re going to get to work with people like that. I thought I’d never get the part. So I wanted to do something very weird. I went in and started ranting and raving and they were laughing their asses off. I was petrified but, I figured, at least they laughed a lot.”

That same willingness to improvise served him well in “Next Stop, Wonderland,” in which he plays a political activist who leaves his girlfriend a videotape of himself explaining all the reasons he’s dumping her and leaving to go help a Native American tribe.

Director Brad Anderson recalls that he only had Hoffman for a weekend’s shooting. To film the videotape scene, he gave Hoffman a general outline of what he wanted and just let Hoffman go for it: “He immediately tapped into it,” Anderson says. “He’s a very funny guy. He’s very comfortable in terms of his ability to go with the flow.”

“I knew a lot of guys like this in college,” Hoffman says. “One of my roommates was kind of like that. I had no direction in college; I knew I wanted to be an actor but other than that? I was just drinking a lot and being an idiot. And he was a political activist who would walk into a room and literally throw pamphlets at me.”

“Montana” director Jennifer Leitzes, on the other hand, was totally underwhelmed when Hoffman walked in to audition for the role of a Machiavellian crime-family middle manager: “When he came in, I shut off because he was physically not the type I was looking for,” she says. “I pictured a much taller, dashing-looking guy. And here’s Phil. Then he opened his mouth and I was totally mesmerized--he was brilliant. And all of a sudden, there was no one else who could do it.”

His looks. Hoffman shakes his head and chuckles ruefully when asked about them. Sitting in a West Village bar eating a turkey burger, Hoffman looks a bit like an unkempt grad student: slight growth of beard, unbuttoned Toledo Mud Hens baseball shirt (though Hoffman is a lifelong fan of the Rochester Red Wings, Toledo’s International League arch-enemies). His strawberry blond hair hangs lankily over his high forehead, wire-rim glasses giving his merry eyes a serious cast.

“A lot of people describe me as chubby, which seems so easy, so first-choice,” he says. “Or stocky. Fair-skinned. Tow-headed. There are so many other choices. How about dense? I mean, I’m kind of a thick guy. But I’m never described in attractive ways. I’m waiting for somebody to say I’m at least cute. But nobody has.”

Leitzes, a big fan, says, “He rides a fine line of being the most innocent-looking guy and the most devilish rogue. It’s all in his physicality. One second, he smiles and you think, ‘Oh, he couldn’t do anything bad,’ and the next second you’re thinking, ‘Oh, he’s the devil!’ He’s such a chameleon. He’s capable of everything.”

While Hoffman admits, “I rarely thought of myself as attractive,” his ability to melt into so many different kinds of character roles may have something to do with his willingness to make himself appear less attractive than he is. He understands the discomfiting power of a character who desperately wants to be attractive and knows he isn’t--someone who, despite his best efforts to hide that fact, radiates his own discomfort from every pore.

Think about the pathetic Scotty in “Boogie Nights,” Hoffman says: “That’s hard for me to watch, because it’s me saying, ‘I know about him. And now you know I know.’ It’s very awkward. But playing it any other way would be compromising. And there is no compromise. There is no other way. It had to be all or nothing.”

That could also be Hoffman’s motto as an actor. Since giving up sports for acting in high school--and then leaving the Rochester, N.Y., area for New York University--he has never looked back. Though there were a couple of lean years waiting tables, lifeguarding and working with children, he’s supported himself as an actor since Martin Brest cast him in “Scent of a Woman” in 1990.

He’s tried to maintain a certain standard in the work he takes: “Acting is so difficult for me that, unless the work is of a certain stature in my mind, unless I reach the expectations I have of myself, I’m unhappy,” he says. “Then it’s a miserable existence. I’m putting a piece of myself out there. If it doesn’t do anything, I feel so ashamed. I’m afraid I’ll be the kind of actor who thought he would make a difference and didn’t. Right now, though, I feel like I made a little bit of difference.”

Which is why, after living in L.A. for two years, he moved back to New York a couple of years ago, throwing himself into theater whenever he didn’t have a film role to work on.

L.A., he says, “was kind of killing me. Your priorities of what’s good get skewed after a while. Bad scripts become OK and OK scripts become good. And things you’d never do in your life, well, if you audition and don’t get a call-back, it’s like death.”

The turning point was “Twister,” which, Hoffman is quick to point out, he’s “very grateful for. It did very well for me.

“But it’s a wild experience to be in the middle of Oklahoma by yourself in an empty apartment, knowing you’ve got two months left. You start to feel aimless. It makes you yearn to get married and have kids. Actually, stability would be a good thing. I wouldn’t mind that at all.”