Aaron Sorkin, an Academy Award winning screenwriter and television creator who has struggled with addiction in the past, says Philip Seymour Hoffman talked about the silver lining of his death years beforehand while both bonded over their drug use on the set of “Charlie Wilson’s War.”
“I told him I felt lucky because I’m squeamish and can’t handle needles. He told me to stay squeamish. And he said this: ‘If one of us dies of an overdose, probably 10 people who were about to won’t,’” Sorkin wrote in Time. “He meant that our deaths would make news and maybe scare someone clean.”
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Sorkin, who also wrote Hoffman’s role in “Moneyball,” called the 46-year-old a “decent, magnificent, thunderous actor” who “completely dominated the real estate upon which every one of his characters walked.”
The “Newsroom” creator does not believe Hoffman died of “an overdose of heroin,” however. Sorkin says Hoffman simply “died from heroin.”
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“We should stop implying that if he’d just taken the proper amount then everything would have been fine,” Sorkin wrote. “He didn’t die because he was partying too hard or because he was depressed — he died because he was an addict on a day of the week with a y in it.”
Hoffman was found dead in his West Village apartment on Sunday. Reports have suggested approximately 50 bags of heroin where found at the scene. Although it is largely suspected that the actor overdosed on heroin, an official cause of death has not yet been determined.
A New York medical examiner told TheWrap on Wednesday that the initial autopsy was inconclusive, and that further tests will be required.