Gaby Hoffmann on her friendship with Louis CK: ‘Cancel culture nonsense is hugely problematic’
Gaby Hoffmann used to play the cute kid in feelgood movies. Big feelgood movies. She was Kevin Costner’s daughter in Field of Dreams; Macaulay Culkin’s little sister and one of John Candy’s rebellious charges in Uncle Buck; the best friend of Tom Hanks’s matchmaking son in Sleepless in Seattle. She had a winning smile, a wisdom beyond her years and a sparky way of delivering a wisecrack. The late writer and director Nora Ephron said she had a “divine bossiness”. For six weeks in 1994, she even had her own American TV show: Someone Like Me, in which she played a precocious 11-year-old called Gaby, with a (less divine) bossy big sister.
Hoffmann had a big sister of her own, Alex Auder, 11 years older than her, whom she idolised. When The New York Times interviewed Auder about the book she wrote about her own childhood, it reported that she kept a list of baby Gaby’s earliest words: “Hot. Penis. B----. I love you.” Acting in a Hollywood movie at the age of six wasn’t the thing that made Hoffmann different: she already was. She was the youngest daughter of Viva, the actress and video artist who had been one of Andy Warhol’s “superstars” in the 1960s and 1970s, along with the likes of Edie Sedgwick and Candy Darling. Until she was 12, Hoffmann lived in New York’s Chelsea Hotel, immortalised in song by Leonard Cohen, Nico, Bob Dylan and, latterly, Taylor Swift; the place where Dylan Thomas drank himself to death, William Burroughs wrote The Naked Lunch, Madonna shot her erotic photobook, Sex, and Sid Vicious (probably) murdered Nancy Spungen.
That grisly event happened four years before Hoffmann was born. Her mother never talked about it, but she recalls that “the door of the apartment where they lived – and then didn’t – was all scratched up, in a sort of haunting way. I remember meditating on that as a child with far too much information.” She remembers Warhol visiting, too, and going to his funeral, aged five. “Nearly every inhabitant of the Chelsea was wonderfully strange, you know, I was surrounded by artists, drug addicts … there was a gay porn shop on the corner where I went to school.”
And, of course, at the centre of her universe was the striking, taboo-breaking star of Warhol’s Blue Movie. How much of Hoffmann is Viva? “What the f---?” she says, miming the vast expanse of time that it would take to give a proper answer to this. “Much of what I appreciate about myself and I’m grateful is a part of me, comes from her,” she decides. “And much of what I appreciate in myself, and I’m grateful is a part of me, is a reaction to my childhood, also.”
Has anyone ever accused Hoffmann (whose late father, Anthony Herrera, acted in a successful soap opera) of being a nepo baby? She snorts, “No, they’d have to have a very faulty understanding of Hollywood. I mean, I got into acting when I was five years old, through a friend of my mother who worked in advertising at Saatchi & Saatchi in New York City, because we were on welfare. It was anything but.”
One of “the huge gifts” that her mother offered Hoffmann and her sister, though, was “a kind of radical honesty”, she tells me. “I just grew up in a world in which you said and did what you thought and felt and that was primary. There was no sense of social norms.”
We’re in a different kind of hotel today, a five-star, luxurious one in central London. Hoffmann, now 42, flew in the day before, is feeling jet-lagged and has wrapped herself in a red blanket for warmth. She’s here to talk about the Netflix series she’s just made with Benedict Cumberbatch: Eric, scripted by Abi Morgan, screenwriter of BBC One’s The Split and the Margaret Thatcher biopic The Iron Lady.
Eric is set in 1980s Manhattan, where Edgar, the nine-year-old son of Hoffmann’s Cassie and Cumberbatch’s Vincent, goes missing on the way to school after yet another violent row between his parents. Cumberbatch plays the creative genius behind a Sesame Street-like TV puppet show, Good Day Sunshine. He’s a loose cannon – irascible, offensive, an alcoholic and substance abuser – who responds to Edgar’s disappearance by developing a psychotic delusion of the giant, bug-eyed monster puppet that his son had been drawing. Hoffmann captures the desperate, panicking sense of a woman on the very edge and shares with Cumberbatch a negative chemistry of startling intensity.
Hoffmann is a parent herself – she and her husband, the writer, teacher and film-maker Chris Dapkins, have a nine-year-old daughter and a six-year-old son – and, while she wasn’t imagining how she would feel in Cassie’s shoes, being a mother meant that she “had much greater and more immediate access to that state of fear and grief that Cassie is in”.
Fear was not something she experienced as a child. “Things that I should have found scary, I didn’t find scary because I was just exposed to so much at such a young age. It all unfortunately was quite normalised for me. It’s really interesting to contemplate now, because I am very careful about what my children are exposed to; they’re quite protected from the world.”
She never felt like a child star, despite being watched on screen by millions. When her mother moved the family to Los Angeles, Hoffmann went to school with Macaulay Culkin and they were close enough as teenagers for her to witness the turmoil he was going through. “Nothing like that occurred to me then, or has yet, or hopefully ever will,” she says.
Culkin stepped away from acting altogether in the mid-1990s; Hoffmann, who continued to act in films such as Volcano and Woody Allen’s Everyone Says I Love You, would ultimately do the same in the 2000s, following her sister to Bard College, the private liberal arts establishment in the Hudson Valley.
The years out were not easy. “I was very lost. I was depressed, anxious, confused, broke,” she says. She thought about alternative careers, before acting pulled her back. She views her career before and after this hiatus not as an interrupted timeline but as two entirely separate things. Since she began working again in earnest in the 2010s, Hoffmann has mixed major roles in indie films, such as Mike Mills’s C’mon C’mon, with interesting parts in high-profile TV shows. She was Louis C K’s love interest in Louie, had people talking about her on-screen nudity as Adam Driver’s sister in Girls, and received Emmy nominations for playing the daughter of Jeffrey Tambor’s father-turned-mother, “Moppa” Maura Pfefferman, in Transparent.
Tambor fits into a list of men Hoffmann has worked with who have been tainted by scandal or controversy. Allen has faced accusations of child abuse, which he denies. Uncle Buck director John Hughes’s films have been called racist and misogynist (Hoffmann said of the late director in 2016, “I remember, one day really feeling that, like, god this guy doesn’t f---ing like me and I’m seven”, and that Candy had looked out for her on set). Louis C K was cancelled, and dropped by his TV network FX, after confessing to sexual misconduct. Tambor left Transparent after sexual harassment allegations, which he described as “utterly untrue”, were made against him. Has Hoffmann felt the need to distance herself from any of them?
“I made a Woody Allen movie 30 years ago, I don’t consider ever having even really known him,” she says. “Louis is a friend. Not a close friend, but you know, I had a good personal experience working with Louis.” She takes a deep breath. “I think everybody has the right to feel how they feel and say what they have to say about experiences they’ve had. I also think that we are dynamic, complicated human beings with a lot going on, and we fail and we make mistakes. And there’s redemption and there’s recovery. Louis is a human being who has many flaws, as we all do. And I don’t feel the need to distance myself from him for actions that were problematic.”
She feels strongly about Tambor. “I have a great deal of love for Jeffrey. If he were to walk into the room right now, I would embrace him with everything I’ve got,” she says. “Was there bad behaviour? Apparently so. Does that define who he is for me completely? No.”
For Hoffmann, the vogue for “binary, right or wrong, cancel culture nonsense is hugely problematic”. She bemoans the way it has become impossible “to sit in the discomfort of the middle” and have discussions “in a civil and understanding way” at a time when “we all are facing extraordinary changes at unprecedented speed”. Something similar is reflected in Eric’s depiction of a fraying, fracturing city that is rigged against its most marginalised members. “Societally, I’m terrified by the state that many of us are in,” she says. “To me, this show is really about what happens when our institutions fail us: the intimate institutions of family and marriage and the larger institutions of government – here, City Hall and the police department. And when these things are corrupted – the larger institutions by greed and power and the smaller ones by trauma and inherited trauma, which leads to mental illness and addiction – we all suffer.”
She widens that malaise to embrace the forthcoming US election and the prospect of a rerun between Trump and Biden – both “incredibly problematic” candidates – which, she suggests, “speaks to the state of our failing democracy in America”. As for her own future, she says, every day she wonders “what I might be doing a year or five years from now. I’m hoping to get trained in the fall as a death doula” – a person who assists with the process of dying – “and that’s something I would very much like to do with my life. I don’t know if as a career or not, but I’m wide open to the uncertainty of the future. And I’m fine with wherever it takes me.”
Eric is on Netflix from May 30
