William H Macy on Philip Seymour Hoffman: 'He Was in Pain'

"Boogie Nights" star William H. Macy is revisiting memories of his co-star Philip Seymour Hoffman eight years after Hoffman's death.

In an interview with Vulture, Macy reflected on Hoffman's brilliance as an actor and offered insight into the demons that haunted him throughout his life.

"He was the best of us; he was never bad," Macy said. "And I don't know if it's just looking back, but I now see that he was in pain. I think the weight of living was heavier on Phil than it is on other people."

Hoffman died in February 2014 of a drug overdose at age 46. His official cause of death was ruled as an accident due to "acute mixed drug intoxication, including heroin, cocaine, benzodiazepines, and amphetamine," according to NME. He had been in and out of rehabilitation and relapsed shortly before his death. 

Hoffman's longtime partner, Mimi O'Donnell, opened up about the actor's battle with addiction in a 2017 op-ed for Vogue saying that she was hesitant to "ascribe Phil's relapse after two decades to any one thing, or even to a series of things."

"Lots of people go through difficult life events," O'Donnell wrote. "Only addicts start taking drugs to blunt the pain of them. And Phil was an addict, though at the time I didn't fully understand that addiction is always lurking just below the surface, looking for a moment of weakness to come roaring back to life."

Speaking with Vulture, Macy said he caught a glimpse of how sensitive Hoffman was during a debate they once had about method acting. The two actors were on a panel together at Sundance when someone in the audience asked about preparation. Macy recalled saying he did not do a lot of preparation for his roles because everything he needed was in the script.

"The character is a trick we play on the audience — you don't have to live the character," he remembered saying to the audience. "That's not acting, it's mental illness."

Hoffman disagreed. 

"He said, 'No, I think there's things you can do to get into the world. Whatever's going on, you've got to find it in yourself, and I think you have to submerge yourself into the world of it,'" Macy continued. "We went back and forth, it was an interesting conversation, and then I suddenly realized, 'What am I saying to him?' I said, 'Whatever you do is [expletive] brilliant all the time,' and he said, 'Thank you, and I think you do it, too, regardless of what you say.' But it was a little window into how deeply he felt stuff."

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