Talking Devon Sawa, Blues Radio and Bloody Marys at the Beach with Gaby Hoffmann

Gaby Hoffmann, the 31-year-old actress much beloved for her childhood roles in Sleepless in Seattle, Field of Dreams and Now & Then, recently returned to the acting world after an extended hiatus and is now co-starring with Michael Cera in the lauded independent film Crystal Fairy, out in theaters now.

“So sorry we couldn’t talk last night,” Hoffmann said when she called me on a Friday afternoon, not a bit of distance in her voice. “I was filming so, so late.”

What are you working on right now?

Two things. One’s an experimental film that we’re doing in this very haphazard guerilla way, and then I’m also working on the Veronica Mars movie.

What do you do if you have an open Sunday in New York City?

What season is it?

Summer.

I’d probably get on my bike and ride to Fort Tilden along Flatbush, and usually my friend who I do this with will make a giant Bloody Mary and put it in a Poland Spring bottle and we’ll go drink it on the beach. I do the same things everyone else in New York does — go to the movies, walk around, ride my bike, see a show. And I spend a lot of time at home.

In the trailer for Crystal Fairy, there’s a tangible sense of that particular, almost pre-ordained contentment that tends to associate itself with hallucinogens but can, if you’re lucky, crop up anywhere. Is that what it felt like on the inside while filming?

Every movie set has its own character and culture, and they’re all distinct and hard to describe — but yeah, this one was really a beast of its own. We loved each other, and that energy you feel in the movie is often how it felt while we were shooting. But of course we were also, you know, making a movie, and no matter what it’s exhausting and often stressful work.

It was like a dream, almost — these seamless transitions from staying together in these cabins, sleeping in the same room, playing music and dancing and eating dinner on the porch, to waking up at dawn and having to confront making something out of nothing. But somehow it felt really natural to me; that’s how I like to live. We were approaching something unfamiliar every day, with every scene, coming at it together.

Do you tend to take on roles that you feel kinship with or ones that you will have to disappear yourself into?

I’m not very interested in playing characters that are a lot like myself, but within every character I always find a way to them that’s through myself. That’s the only way I know how to do it, because I’m not trained. So I have a lot of fun playing people who seem really dissimilar to me on the outside — because every time, the reason that I can do it is that I end up stepping into a part of myself that maybe I didn’t even know about, and exaggerating it.

What part of yourself did you step into for Crystal Fairy?

It’s funny to think about it now — now I feel like I know her so well that it’s hard to remember when she felt different. Let me see! I am a fairly impulsive and adventurous person, as she is, but I think she’s running away from a part of herself. I think that’s the engine of her free-spirited side, and I’m happy to say that’s a real distinction between the two of us.

But, like her, I’m comfortable with myself physically, I’m outspoken, I’m loud, and the fun of playing a character like her is to get in there and tweak those things, turn the volume up, and be weirdly less self-aware. Same qualities, expressed in a different way.

I watched an interview recently where you talked about the nudity in Crystal Fairy — you were saying you “grew up in a naked way,” that you don’t have boundaries. Very recently I got drunk and made a list of my good and bad qualities, and “no sense of boundaries” was at the top of both. For you, is lacking boundaries a good or bad thing?

Having no boundaries is something about myself that I really, really appreciate, and the older I get and the more I get to know myself, the more I appreciate it. I think it’s a really unique quality, and I’m sort of saying this directly to you now — I think that most, or maybe at least a lot, of people in this world are living in this world with layers of filters and fears and boundaries that they don’t even know are there. And I think that whatever risks and dangers may be the product of having very few boundaries are really offset by the openness that’s created.

I don’t usually think in these terms, really. I remember before that interview I’d just gotten a tarot card reading, and someone said that particular phrase to me, “no sense of boundaries,” and something about it, even — I don’t know.

It presumes that having boundaries is preferable.

Yeah, which says something about the human experience that I’m really not sure about. Now I’m curious — I wonder if you weren’t thinking about something very particular when you put boundaries in the bad side.

I was. You’re exactly right about all of this, I think.

Of course, I do think it’s important to know yourself enough to know what you need to protect yourself in the world. For me, I just grew up in a certain way. Talk about no boundaries. I barely had a choice to determine how many boundaries I wanted, let alone set them.

What would be different for you if you were starting off as a child actor right now?

Hmm. I’m trying to imagine, but it’s so hard — I would never have had the same kind of experience that these kids are having, just because of who my mother was. I can tell you that if I hadn’t started acting as a child, I probably wouldn’t touch the industry today with a ten-foot pole. I don’t know how anyone starts off here as an adult. The insanity of the culture would seem so unappealing to me if I were on the outside of it.

But, because I’m on the inside, I know that it’s not how it seems from the outside. I love it, and have the most loving and intelligent friends who are in the business (and of course tons who are not). You can navigate it in a way that doesn’t make you crazy. But I only know that because of the particular way my life has gone.

You were out of the game during the “let’s-tart-up-the-child-star” years. Was that an intentional sidestep or something that happened to work out as you pursued other stuff?

It wasn’t intentional to skip those years and come back. It just happened that I missed the boat of having to really grow up in public — and I did go through ages five to 17 while I was working, but in those years you’re not really contending with yourself the way you do in your twenties. Really, when I went to college, I thought I would never act again. I was very ambivalent about it. I thought, “Everyone and their fucking mother wants to line up and be in a movie, and I’m not so passionate about it that I have to do it, so I shouldn’t.” I respect that sort of desire but really didn’t have it, and it took me years not to feel guilty or self-indulgent, to not think, “Who do I think I am?”

But I’m over that now. I feel very privileged to get to do something that I love.

What was your major in college?

I went to study literature and writing, but didn’t end up doing that — I got there in ’99, and suddenly it was the Bush administration, and we went to war, and I got totally concerned with the sociopolitical state of things. So I did the political science, environmental studies thing for a minute. I really couldn’t see past current events, you know? You’re 18 or 19 years old and you feel like the world is literally going to hell, and suddenly reading 200-year-old novels or making movies feels totally inane.

I remember talking to my mentor, who was this radical Marxist, an eco-socialist, as he calls himself, and I asked him what the best thing to do was. He said, “The only useful thing you could possibly do is become an environmental lawyer.” I said, “FUCK, that makes me want to kill myself, but there’s clearly no other option.”

Eventually I dug myself out of that hole, and I made up my own major, which was something you could do at Bard, and made a film. And like I said, it was a long road to get back to acting again.

What do you like to read? Online or off.

I don’t do much reading on the Internet. Sometimes the news, the New York Times, except on Sundays when I’ll spring for the real thing. Otherwise I read a lot of short fiction. I’m a big Alice Munro fan, Ann Beattie too. I go through phases — I did a long period of just reading nonfiction, but I’m back to fiction, and just started Brothers Karamazov for the tenth time because I read a lot of Russian literature in college but missed out on that one.

I’ve also been reading a lot of about David Foster Wallace, who I got sort of obsessed with after he died. I can’t stop reading about him even though it’s perpetuating this very painful experience of falling in love with someone who committed suicide.

What music have you been listening to?

I don’t participate very much in the Internet, I don’t do social media stuff, so I’m isolated from the bigger conversation about what’s going on with music — I don’t hear anything new unless someone plays it for me or I hear it on the radio, which I rarely listen to, other than NPR. I do love the radio program “Something Inside of Me,” a blues program in New York. But I pretty much listen to old standards. Neil Young, old country. Erykah Badu.

What do you dislike the most in a person, and what draws you in?

I find it pretty hard to be around people who are so uncomfortable with themselves that they act like assholes. I sort of assume that if you’re acting like an asshole, then you’re not happy with yourself.

And, I generally appreciate a good sense of humor, which is hard to come by unless you’re fairly smart. I like to talk about — this is cheesy — I like to really talk about things. I like to be surrounded by people who can be honest about how they feel, who are self-aware.

As you said before, people might assume that friends like that would be hard to find in the film industry — but this isn’t the case?

Yeah, not at all. Of course, I’m not in Hollywood in the same way that other people are. I’m not surrounded by film execs and movie stars, I’m surrounded by people who make independent films.

You’ve worked with so many people over the last few decades. Has anyone been markedly different than how the public perceives them to be?

Pretty much everyone is very different from how the public perceives them to be.

What’s your drink of choice at the bar?

Depends on the bar. If it’s a good bar, I like a really well-made margarita, but if it’s a bar-bar, just a beer.

What do you worry about?

I worry about my mom a lot. She’s 75, and I wonder about what’s going to happen to her because of this strange way we’re now living as a human community. It’s scary and sad that our parents are becoming old. My mom lives alone in the middle of Southern California, and I feel like she should be with me — that we should be raising each other, even though I know that doesn’t make sense for my life, or my sister’s life as she raises her niece and nephew in New York City, and it’s not even how we work as a society anymore.

That’s a lot of what I worry about — her getting older and staying engaged, being taken care of.

So I’m one of those Now and Then people that feels almost totemic about that movie, and your role specifically — I think Samantha was one of the first (and still few) characters that I identified with on screen. How do you think about that movie now, almost two decades after you filmed it?

Oh, I had a ball. Christina and I, we sort of fell in love while we filmed it. We became really close. We just had so, so much fun.

Did you guys all have crushes on Devon Sawa as much as your audience did?

He was my boyfriend! But only for a week. I broke up with him, I don’t remember why. I think I was too contentious? Everyone had a crush on him, so I sort of realized it wasn’t going to work.

In your twenties, you trained as a chef and as a doula — are there any other things like that outside of acting that you still feel curious about trying?

I hope that I’ll continue to feel curious about new things forever. But right now I’m just happy that I’m curious about acting, that I’m excited about it — so many years I was being drawn away from it by my interests in other things, and right now I’m just super into what I’m doing.

I am interested in making films myself at some point. I don’t know if I’ll be good at it, but I want to try.

Quick last round of questions. Beach or mountains?

It’s funny you should ask me that, because one of my favorite places in the world is this beach in Mexico, but it’s my favorite because there are mountains behind it. If I had to pick — I mean, what about both? I lived, for a long time, on a mountain with a lake, in the western foothills of the Catskills.

Both sounds great. Sweet or savory?

Savory.

Whiskey or tequila?

Tequila, although I do like whiskey.

Fall or spring?

Hmm. Spring.

Cats or dogs?

Dogs.

East Coast or West Coast?

That’s really, really hard. East.

Invisibility or flying?

Flying.

Time machine or crystal ball?

Time machine! I would love to go back to other times, but I don’t mean in my own life — I’m not interested in revisiting anything. And I don’t want to know what will happen in the future.