Philip Seymour Hoffman Was a Bills Fan

The first and only time I met Philip Seymour Hoffman he had a New York Jets puffball hat on.

“You’re a Jets fan?” I asked, while waiting for other journalists to show up to the roundtable interview scheduled with him in a Salt Lake City café during the Sundance Film Festival in 2010.

“No. It’s just cold,” he replied. “And the Bills suck.”

That’s the kind of guy Hoffman was. Honest and quick to share.

But even before I met up with Hoffman, I got an even heartier taste of his personality.

As I walked to the cafe for the interview, one about his 2010 Sundance flick “Jack Goes Boating,” I spotted him about a half block ahead of me. Continuing my trek in the snow-covered Utah streets, two teenagers walked by him.

Unfortunately for them, they didn’t know it was an Academy Award winner who just strolled by.

“Was that Michael Moore?” one of the teens said in reference to another husky Hollywood celebrity, but one who unlike Hoffman, had never been in a nude scene with Marisa Tomei.

In an instant, Hoffman turned around and shot them a look that assured them he was not the man they thought he was.

If anything, he should have considered it a compliment. Hoffman made a career of looking and acting like men that no one ever thought he could be. From his portrayal of legendary rock critic Lester Bangs in “Almost Famous” to his Oscar-winning performance in “Capote,” Hoffman had an uncanny ability to become whoever he needed to be.

In “Jack Goes Boating,” Hoffman was both the star and the director, which was something new for him. In his trademark way, Hoffman was able to share how his first Hollywood director’s gig was different than his usual role as a character actor.

“Acting is scary. Acting is a much harder job in the moment in a lot of ways,” Hoffman said in the 2010 interview. “Directing is a very long job and you have to deal with many people. It’s an arduous job, but it’s satisfying because you’re always around people. In the beginning of the day and at the end. Actors, on the other hand, are always alone. It’s a lonely profession.”

Although the interview was about 15 minutes, those types of comments and those from the cast of the film exposed a side of Hoffman that rest of the world would use to categorize his real character, but few would ever really understand.

“He maximized the feeling the film had,” Jack Goes Boating co-star Daphen Rubin-Vega said about Hoffman’s directing style. “He’s an intense person; that’s just the way he is. He was wonderful and generous to us. As an actor, he’s very serious, but as a director, he was great to us. He loved us.”

Regardless of how the rest of the media portrays the events that led to his untimely death, the image of a wonderful actor, in a New York Jets hat, with his hair sticking out and his heart on his sleeve, is how I’d like to remember him.