Interview: Actress Gaby Hoffmann Is Now Playing Adults

At the age of 30, having deliberately stepped away from acting and show business for five years to figure out what she wanted to do, Gaby Hoffman has decided that acting is a choice she wants to make for herself.
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At the age of 30, having deliberately stepped away from acting and show business for five years to figure out what she wanted to do, Gaby Hoffmann has decided that acting is a choice she wants to make for herself -- after a successful career based on a choice someone else made for her.

"Going into my 20s, I was uncertain, trying to figure out what my relationship to acting is," Hoffmann says in a telephone interview. "I'd started acting as a child. But I wanted to see if it was something my true personality was interested in. I stepped away from offers when I took five years off to go to college. I've only really just decided to whole-heartedly embrace acting."

So Hoffmann - who was launched with her first two films, 1989's Uncle Buck and Field of Dreams, both at the age of 7 -- has rededicated herself to working as an actor, though she recognizes that her progress may be slower this time.

"The early part of my career was the 1990s, and I was living in New York working as an actor," Hoffmann says. "It was the world I was in. A lot of companies had a great deal of money. Now independent film is either part of the Hollywood system or it's become smaller. For me, the biggest change is that I'm no longer part of that conversation."

But she's working at finding work. She actually got a call from the casting director of Nate & Margaret, in which she plays a party-animal pal of the male title character, a gay college-age filmmaker (who has a Harold & Maude-ish relationship with the other half of the title). And she recently did a bravura turn on Louie opposite Louis C.K., who let her talk her way through a break-up with him guided only by his facial expressions, shrugs and other body language.

This interview continues on my website.

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