Cooper Hoffman
Cooper Hoffman is an actor, born 2003.
Almost nobody starts here. Hoffman, born in New York in 2003, had no screen credits at all when Paul Thomas Anderson cast him to lead Licorice Pizza (2021), and the performance drew a Golden Globe nomination on the first attempt. He is the son of Philip Seymour Hoffman, which is the fact that usually explains a career like this, and here mostly explains which rooms he was standing in.
The thing he does well is specific and slightly unfashionable. As Gary Valentine he plays a teenager entirely convinced he is already an adult, and he plays the conviction straight rather than mining it for laughs. That is why the film works: the comedy comes from the audience seeing what the character cannot, and it only lands if the actor refuses to wink.
Since then the choices have been unusually varied for someone with this little mileage. He was Manley Pointer in Wildcat (2023) and Wihlborg in Old Guy (2024), took the role of a young Dick Ebersol in Saturday Night (2024), then carried The Long Walk (2025) as Raymond Garraty, the lead of a King adaptation that asks an actor to hold the screen while doing almost nothing but keep moving. In 2025 he also made his stage debut off Broadway in Sam Shepard's Curse of the Starving Class. Ahead are Elliot in I Want Your Sex and Greg Brockman in Artificial.
Movies (7)
Where to start with Cooper Hoffman
Licorice Pizza first, and not only because it is the best film in the list. It is the one where you can watch an untrained actor discover what he can do on camera, and the looseness of the performance is the point.
Follow it with The Long Walk, which is the hardest test he has taken so far: a lead role in an endurance story where the character has no room to charm anyone. Whether you think he passes is a fair argument, but the ambition is not in doubt.
Saturday Night is the fun one, a small part in an ensemble sprint, and it shows he can play a real person without doing an impression. Wildcat is the strangest thing here, a literary adaptation where he turns up as Manley Pointer, and it is worth the detour if you like your American gothic dry. Old Guy is skippable unless you are completist.