You may have thought Gaby Hoffmann had grown up to be Demi Moore but no, she is in fact her own person and not her prenaturally wise character of Samantha from Now and Then. After a hiatus from acting with any regularity – during which time she did a normal thing and went to college – Hoffmann is doing the interview circuit to promote new work, prompting us to realize that we like her even more than we used to.
Though Hoffmann’s popped up more and more over the past few years, largely in television, she’s been decidedly low-profile compared to the early ’90s when she was taking starring roles in movies like Field of Dreams or Sleepless in Seattle. An extensive New York Times Magazine interview with her about her new movie with Michael Cera called Crystal Fairy reveals that she’s spent that time kicking it in the woods, trying to figure out if she wanted to act again. (There’s also the added bonus of lots of details about her rare childhood as the daughter of an actress, growing up in the Chelsea Hotel. In Hoffmann’s words, “We’d spend a summer at Gore Vidal’s house in Italy, but we were on and off welfare.”)
It might have been her bohemian lifestyle as a kid, coupled with her break from Hollywood, that has led Hoffmann to a place where she doesn’t act – or look – like a lot of other actresses. Writer Taffy Brodesser-Akner notes as much in her profile of Hoffmann:
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