{"id":789919,"date":"2026-07-28T19:50:08","date_gmt":"2026-07-28T19:50:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/789919\/"},"modified":"2026-07-28T19:50:08","modified_gmt":"2026-07-28T19:50:08","slug":"cooper-hoffman-keeps-bridging-age-gaps-with-star-power","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/789919\/","title":{"rendered":"Cooper Hoffman keeps bridging age gaps with star power"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since Cooper Hoffman made his film debut in Licorice Pizza<\/a>, a film made by a friend of his father Philip Seymour Hoffman<\/a>, the actor has been typecast in a way almost entirely unlike young stars of his ilk. He\u2019s not an action hero, or a zany comedian, or a heartthrob hunk, or an anonymously handsome everyman who can be slotted into the latest brand-accurate live-action piece of IP. Rather, Hoffman\u2019s early career has seen him become the go-to young man who falls head-over-heels for an older woman, capturing something essential about the experience of getting in over your head when crushing on someone out of your league (and your age demographic).<\/p>\n

An underage teen getting involved with cool older girl Alana Haim is really different than a twentysomething employee getting sucked into a BDSM-heavy Sunset Boulevard situationship with his boss Olivia Wilde (as happens in Gregg Araki\u2019s I Want Your Sex<\/a>). Both of these are different from a college kid projecting immature feelings onto his older classmate Leslie Mann (as happens in Maude Apatow\u2019s directorial debut Poetic License<\/a>). Yet, the same kinds of coming-of-age principles apply to all these movies, as do Hoffman\u2019s strengths as a performer. From his very first role, his bouncy, happy-go-lucky, Labrador-like confidence\u2014an embodied sense that everything will go right for him, if only because his sunny worldview refuses to allow other possibilities\u2014overwhelms the other telltale signs of a precocious movie youth.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

This arrives fully formed in Licorice Pizza, where teen actor Gary Valentine acts older because he\u2019s a Hollywood professional already adept at hustling, a guy trained to be \u201con\u201d from a young age, to whom performing is as natural as breathing. Why wouldn\u2019t he want to play another, older role\u2014the young romantic\u2014especially as his youth-centric acting work dries up? Valentine\u2019s puppy-love circling of 25-year-old photo studio employee Alana (Haim) is more about what she represents than her as a person, a common thread among Hoffman\u2019s early age-gap kinda-romances. Alana seems like a door to an adult world he keeps pretending to know like the back of his hand, even though Licorice Pizza cares enough about her character to reveal that she\u2019s mostly just faking it too.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This dichotomy operates in a more obvious way in Poetic License, where Leslie Mann\u2019s Liz\u2014a woman who audits a poetry class at the university where her husband teaches\u2014becomes the object of relatively innocent infatuation for two of her college-aged classmates (BFFs played by Hoffman and Andrew Barth Feldman). Even if Liz wasn\u2019t the mother of a high school senior about to enter college in her own right, Mann is literally the mother of director Maude Apatow. The mommy issues are palpable.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The boys\u2019 stereotypical desire for a mature, motherly presence (that also has the possibility of romance) is sweet at times, but it is also inescapable. Thankfully, Liz\u2019s own dissatisfactions with her life are given plenty of space, which helps separate the film from more one-sided comedies featuring messy men and put-together women. There\u2019s an honesty to Poetic License\u2018s unearthing of the subtext pervading the era of slacker dude comedies (these man-children want moms!), and it all plays much more palatably because of Hoffman\u2019s earnestness. He\u2019s not looking to be taken care of, he\u2019s striving to be taken seriously.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This unifying factor across these roles is perhaps why all these women end up actually giving him the time of day. Hoffman\u2019s performances rely on soft, energetic affability\u2014it\u2019s an alluring approach for his female foils, especially those worn down by the world of men, looking to find appreciative male attention or otherwise bask in the glow of nonthreatening desire.<\/p>\n

This comes to a head in the most explicit and subversive of these onscreen relationships: that in Araki\u2019s horndog dramedy I Want Your Sex. But the film isn\u2019t subversive because it portrays a younger man as the more-than-willing submissive to an established female dom. Rather, it\u2019s subversive in the context of Hoffman\u2019s other early roles\u2014this age-gap relationship actually does lead to a painful power imbalance. Araki weaponizes Hoffman\u2019s boyishness to give his character Elliott a leg-humpingly potent sex drive\u2014all that guileless charm is poured into various kink scenarios\u2014one that confrontational artist Erika Tracy (Wilde) takes full advantage of.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Like in Pillion<\/a>, Elliott has an aptitude for devotion and a partner happy to exploit it. Erika sees plenty of potential in this manic doofus, and their Secretary fling allows him to sexually come of age, discovering all the enjoyable ways he can leave the world of prudes behind\u2026before getting predictably burned by a woman who everyone warns him will chew him up and spit him out. The heartbreaking moments work just as well as the funny, sexy ones, because Hoffman succeeds at conveying just how legitimizing it is to be taken seriously by someone you admire.<\/p>\n

One of the funniest jokes in I Want Your Sex is a framing device where some cops, questioning Elliott about a crime, describe him as being groomed by Erika. Elliott protests that this was all very consensual, and part of Hoffman\u2019s talent lies in how easily he makes this statement believable, silly, and disarming all at once. His onscreen characters might be impatient to grow up, but they\u2019re also invested enough in the present that their relationships always feel honest. The actor\u2019s bright presence in these films, his visible admiration of his scene partners, his slack-jawed grin that almost breaches himbo territory\u2014these aren\u2019t qualities shown off by many rising stars, which might be why Hoffman\u2019s early career doesn\u2019t have many peers. Like so many of his characters, he already seems like he\u2019s on his way to bigger things, like he naturally fits into a more established world and is simply stuck in another for the time being thanks to a temporal fluke.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Since Cooper Hoffman made his film debut in Licorice Pizza, a film made by a friend of his…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":789920,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[236,88],"class_list":["post-789919","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/789919","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=789919"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/789919\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/789920"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=789919"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=789919"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=789919"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}