Years before his apparent fatal heroin overdose, Philip Seymour Hoffman talked with Aaron Sorkin about dying with a needle in his arm — and mused that his death might save 10 other addicts from the same fate.
“He said this: ‘If one of us dies of an overdose, probably 10 people who were about to won’t,’ ” the “West Wing” creator, himself a recovering addict, wrote in a newly published essay.
“He meant that our deaths would make news and maybe scare someone clean,” Sorkin wrote in Time magazine.
Sorkin, 52, was recalling a conversation he had with Hoffman during rehearsals for the 2007 movie “Charlie Wilson’s War,” in which the actor played CIA agent Gust Avrakotos.
“On breaks during rehearsals, we would sometimes slip outside our soundstage on the Paramount lot and get to swapping stories,” Sorkin wrote in the moving piece, which seemed to indicate that Hoffman wasn’t using at the time — but had acknowledged he could relapse in the future.
“It’s not unusual to have these mini-AA meetings — people like us are the only ones to whom tales of insanity don’t sound insane,” Sorkin noted.
“I told him I felt lucky because I’m squeamish and can’t handle needles,” Sorkin told Hoffman, who had said publicly that he was a recovering addict.
“He told me to stay squeamish,” Sorkin added.
The Academy Award-winning writer — who did the screenplays for “Charlie Wilson’s War” and another of Hoffman’s films, “Moneyball” (2011) — concluded his essay by giving voice to the message behind Hoffman’s wordless farewell to the world.
“Phil Hoffman, this kind, decent, magnificent, thunderous actor, who was never outwardly ‘right’ for any role but who completely dominated the real estate upon which every one of his characters walked, did not die from an overdose of heroin — he died from heroin,” Sorkin stressed.
“We should stop implying that if he’d just taken the proper amount, then everything would have been fine.
“He didn’t die because he was partying too hard or because he was depressed — he died because he was an addict on a day of the week with a y in it. He’ll have his well-earned legacy — his Willy Loman that belongs on the same shelf with Lee J. Cobb’s and Dustin Hoffman’s, his Jamie Tyrone, his Truman Capote and his Academy Award. Let’s add to that 10 people who were about to die who won’t now.”
Sorkin had long admired Hoffman’s work, he said, “since his remarkably perfect film debut as a privileged, cowardly prep-school kid in “Scent of a Woman” in 1992, when Hoffman was in his early 20s.
Hoffman had just quit drugs and alcohol a few years prior to that breakthrough role.
The actor told “60 Minutes” in a 2006 interview that he “got sober,” when he was 22 years old.
“Anything I could get my hands on. Yeah. Yeah. I liked it all,” he recalled when asked which poisons he preferred.
Asked why he stopped, he said, “You get panicked. You get panicked. I was 22, and I got panicked in my life.”