In the summer of 2021, a year after Cooper Hoffman finished filming Licorice Pizza — the movie that would make him a movie star practically overnight — he was on the set of Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans, working one of the lowest jobs on the crew’s hierarchy.
His official title was COVID production assistant, which meant that he sat at a folding table, clipboard in hand, checking in the cast and crew as they arrived for their daily nasal swabs. Hoffman had been dispatched to the production by Licorice Pizza director Paul Thomas Anderson, who knew about the attention, praise and potential for ego inflation that would come when that film hit theaters in a few short months. “He told me, ‘You’ve seen how this side lives, now you have to see the other side,’ ” says Hoffman. Though Anderson has been minting young talent for decades, this young actor was different: His father is the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, PTA’s close friend and longtime collaborator, whose 2014 death devastated the filmmaking world.
Myles Hendrik
That made his stint as a PA, a job that would typically be anonymous, different too. When Spielberg caught wind of Hoffman’s presence on set, his reaction was, according to Hoffman, “Why didn’t I know about this?” An introduction was quickly arranged. “It was like meeting the president,” Hoffman says with his boisterous laugh. “I stood there with the first AD and a security guard, and they were like, ‘Steven’s approaching.’ He’s 20 feet away, and I can see him walking up. We had maybe a five-minute conversation, but he was lovely and was like, ‘I’m so happy that I got to meet you; Licorice Pizza was fantastic.’ ”
