The Time I Had Lunch With Philip Seymour Hoffman

Of all the folks I’ve interviewed, Philip Seymour Hoffman was the most skittish at the beginning. It was a smallish neighborhood cafe -- his, not mine -- during lunch rush and I had the recorder running before he arrived.

“Maybe we don’t need to record all this, as we order,” he said when the waiter came by for our drink order.

I told him I try to work the food stuff into the Q&A, which is true. Hoffman frowned.

“I’m just saying maybe he doesn’t want to be recorded, that’s all.”
Maybe ‘skittish’ is the wrong word altogether. Maybe he was only sensitive, polite. Considerate of others. Maybe I was the skittish one. I had seen him a few weeks before in Death of a Salesman, and I saw The Master a day or two before we met. I was freshly awed.

Addiction came up a couple of times, but sideways. I knew that he got sober at age 22, and I said so, and said I wished I’d gotten an earlier start on it myself. A few months later, I saw that he’d gone through a 10-day detox program after a relapse that had begun more than a year before.
Now this. I don’t know where or when I first heard it, but it’s no less true now: Never bet the addict. Bet the drug.

Source: http://www.esquire.com