It is arguable that Phillip Seymour Hoffman (PSH to you and me) is one of the best actors working today. I just came across this interview with PSH in Psychology Today that makes for a great read. As interviews with actors go, it moves along a different tangent as it focuses on the more cerebral side of acting and less on the Hollywood fluff.

He’s in the boiler room, pinned on his back. Philip Seymour Hoffman is 13 years old, just over five feet tall and losing a wrestling match, badly. This being wrestling, lowest in the hierarchy of school sports and chronically underfunded, matches take place in the bowels of buildings and the onlookers, mostly parents, are forced to sit on the cold floor, close by. There his mother is watching him fail. Suddenly she scrambles to her hands and knees on the corner of the mat, looks him dead in the eye and cries, “Get up, get up,” pounding her fists on the floor for emphasis. He glares back at her. “I can’t! I can’t!” he screams.

This is a story that Hoffman, arguably the world’s finest actor, tells about himself to maintain perspective. His latest film, Capote, is garnering all kinds of accolades: The best movie about journalism ever made. The most emotionally taut portrait of an artist overcome by ambition ever drawn. That’s just for the movie.