Philip Seymour Hoffman‘s longtime partner has opened up for the first time about the famed actor’s fatal 2014 heroin overdose in Manhattan — recounting his slide back into addiction after decades of sobriety and the gut-wrenching moment she realized he was using again.
“As soon as Phil started using heroin again, I sensed it, terrified. I told him, ‘You’re going to die. That’s what happens with heroin,’” director and producer Mimi O’Donnell recalls telling Hoffman — the father of their three kids — in a new piece for Vogue.
Before he fell off the wagon in 2012, the couple had it all, she writes.
“We were living in the West Village. We had three healthy kids. Phil’s career was skyrocketing. He and I were still collaborating on theater and films, and I had started directing plays. We had wonderful friends. We had money,” O’Donnell writes. “I couldn’t have imagined a better life.”
Hoffman had been clean and sober since a battle with booze and heroin in his early 20s, but made the fateful decision to start drinking again that year — following the death of his longtime therapist and amid a fallout with his Alcoholics Anonymous friends, who’d fallen by the wayside as his film career skyrocketed.
“The first tangible sign came when, out of nowhere, Phil said to me, ‘I’ve been thinking I want to try to have a drink again. What do you think?’ I thought it was a terrible idea, and I said so,” O’Donnell writes.
“Sobriety had been the center of Phil’s life for over 20 years, so this was definitely a red flag.”
But things didn’t go seriously downhill until after his celebrated turn in “Death of a Salesman” on Broadway that year, when he began taking prescription opioid pills — and soon started shooting up again.
He went to rehab twice, but couldn’t stay clean.
“Within a day or two of returning, he started using again. At home, he was behaving differently, and it was making the kids anxious,” she writes.
Hoffman moved out of their home for the kids’ safety, and the family made a plan for a third try at rehab after he wrapped filming on “The Hunger Games” — but he never made it.
“It happened so quickly. Phil came home from Atlanta, and I called a few people and said that we needed to keep an eye on him,” O’Donnell writes. “Then he started using again, and three days later he was dead.”
Hoffman was found dead with a needle in his arm and surrounded by drugs in the bathroom of his Greenwich Village apartment on Feb. 2, 2014.
Four years later, O’Donnell says she and their kids are only just now able to talk about him without immediately bursting into tears.
“That’s the small difference, the little bit of progress that we’ve made. We can talk about him in a way that feels as though there’s a remembrance of what happened to him, but that also honors him,” she writes.