Philip Seymour Hoffman dead?

[gummi]

Very sad news. He has always been one of my favorite actors.

[mikeMc6]

This totally bummed me out. He even directed well received, smart plays in New York. Such an incredible amount of self-loathing involved when you get involved in heroin. Such a smart guy, such a dumb drug....and don't get me started about leaving three young kids behind, if true. Horrible.

[megoapesnut]

One of the best actors of our era. Very sad

[Brown Bear]

The hell with his career or talent. I feel for his children. Those poor souls are the losers in this story, not this guys fans.

Can't say I'm a fan of anyone who chooses this path when they should have their kids as the top priority. Whatta shame.

[Earth 2 Chris]

Can't say I'm a fan of anyone who chooses this path when they should have their kids as the top priority. Whatta shame.

Same here. I have a hard time with it. Some view that as unsympathetic, or unrealistic, but when you have kids...man, you just got to do whatever you can to be there for them. I don't get it.

Chris

[weshightower21]

You don't get it because you've never done "JUNK". Junk or any opiates aren't like booze where you can get smashed and forget your problems. Opiates,you remember all your problems... you just don't give a ****.

[weshightower21]

Sorry. i'm not trying to be a smartazz

[Brazoo]

One of my weirdest experiences at the Toronto Film Festival was when I saw Philip Seymour Hoffman introduce his very dark, weird and tragic movie "Love Liza":

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0282698/reference

Actors can be surprisingly uncomfortable public speakers sometimes. It seems unintuitive, but I've gotten use to it. I've also been to screenings where actors were unbelievably unfocused and incoherent - Hoffman was all of these things, but he also seemed to be mocking the movie we were about to watch. I've never seen that before. At first it seemed like he was making light of the movie out of modesty - or maybe in recognition of the fact that the movie had ZERO chance of ever reaching a larger audience - but as he kept talking and the smile on the director's face uncomfortably twisted around I thought to myself that something very weird was happening.

The director was actor Todd Louiso (who you might remember as Dick, the nerdy quiet guy from "High Fidelity"). Before introducing Hoffman Louiso told us how personal this movie was for everyone involved, how it took years to get funding, how Hoffman's brother wrote the screenplay, so it was especially strange to see Hoffman sort of shrugging off the movie like this.

Some of the things Hoffman said actually ruined any chance I had of appreciating the movie - it seem like he purposefully sabotaged the movie out of some kind of spite. I remember Hoffman was half laughing when he said something like "the ending will seem tragic to most people, but the smart viewer will see that the ending is also uplifting" ----

---I'm just going to mention (SPOILER ALERT) the movie is about a man who becomes addicted to gasoline huffing after his wife commits suicide. It ends with the main character wandering off homeless after destroying his cognitive brain function. It's got some very dark humor throughout, but there is no way to see how the movie's ending was uplifting.

He must have been kidding. I thought Hoffman was a jerk. He set us up for something that never happened - he ruined his movie for a full audience just for some kind of dumb inside joke with himself.

When he admitted to his heroin addiction a little while ago I thought of this movie and that incident - I couldn't help but make a connection. When I heard he died this was the first thing I thought of. Maybe he wasn't being a jerk. Maybe to him that movie's ending was uplifting.

People are a mystery. All I know for sure is that I really enjoyed his acting in a lot of movies.

[Iron Mego]

Plus, he was very aware that his problem could and most likely would lead to his death. He said as much in numerous interviews.

I really, really, REALLY liked his work. I have no idea what he was like as a person, and don't really care, but it angers me that he did this to himself and his family.