There are no more bohemian childhoods than that of Gaby Hoffmann . For the first 11 years of her life, her mother, painter and video artist Susan Hoffmann, who was renamed “Viva” by her close friend Andy Warhol, raised her in New York’s legendary Chelsea Hotel. And if calling the historic 12-story hotel home, along with high-profile residents like William S Burroughs, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, wasn’t unconventional enough, by Gaby’s 12th birthday, she had starred alongside Kevin Costner, Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in Hollywood blockbusters like “ Love Tune ” and “ Field of Dreams ”.
However, in her late teens, she withdrew from the limelight, went to college, and spent much of her twenties adrift, interning briefly with a chef and training as a doula. “She didn’t know what she wanted to do and she was everywhere,” shrugs Gaby Hoffmann. “It took me years to find my way back into acting.” But now as a grown woman, Gaby Hoffmann became a mainstay on the small screen’s most uncompromising shows, including Lena Dunham’s “Girls” and Joey Soloway’s “Transparent.”
In 2021 Gaby Hoffmann worked on the movie “C’mon C’mon” . Presented in sleek black and white, it stars Joaquin Phoenix as “Johnny,” a radio producer who cares for his sister Viv’s (played by Gaby) infant son while she cares for his estranged bipolar partner. The relationship between uncle and nephew blossoms as the couple travels across the United States, with Hoffmann’s tender scenes largely enacted on the other end of the phone line. Like Viv, Hoffmann is again entrenched in a fragile sibling relationship, much like her characters in Transparent and Girls.
Since Gaby Hoffmann and Joaquin Phoenix’s characters haven’t seen each other since their mother’s death, she asked if she couldn’t meet Phoenix until they filmed their first scene together. “I’m not a method actress at all,” she says, “but she added this charge to the moment.” Both are former child stars of a similar generation — Phoenix broke through in 1989’s “Parenthood,” the same year as Hoffmann’s film debut in “Field of Dreams,” so it seems odd that they never met before. “Well, we may have crossed paths on a dimly lit Manhattan street,” Hoffmann laughs.
“C’mon C’mon” marked seven years since Gaby Hoffmann’s last film role, in 2014’s Romance in Manhattan. “I really love my job so much. I feel like the luckiest person in the world to be able to do this for a living, but I don’t want to do it that often,” she says with a smile. Such enthusiasm, albeit in spurts, is a marked change from how Hoffmann felt three decades ago. As one of the most visible young actresses of the early 1990s, she followed the blockbuster hits “Uncle Buck” and “Love Tune” before starring in her own comedy “Someone Like Me” with only 12 years old.
By 2022 there was a well-deserved lead role in the life of Gaby Hoffmann, in the series “ Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty ” about the LA Lakers basketball team. for HBO. In it she played “Claire Rothman”, the first female manager of a major sports arena, alongside John C Reilly, Adrien Brody and Sally Field, as well as newcomer Quincy Isaiah as Magic Johnson. Hoffmann shined as Claire Rothman, who suffered sexist treatment from her colleagues, even as she was reinventing the business by scheduling concerts and events in the off-season.
There are few roles that Gaby Hoffmann decides to take, but this last one was definitely for her. After they urged her three times to meet with the director, she was enthusiastic about the job: “Over the course of the 10 hours it took me with all my technical difficulties, I had a lot of fun. By the end of the day I was like, ‘Oh, I see why they wanted to see me do this.’ It was really playing Claire that I got interested in wanting to play Claire. As my husband said: ‘It will be a lot of fun watching you play a neoliberal heterosexual adult.’ Because I’m perpetually playing too big a kid.”
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