10 Philip Seymour Hoffman Performances That Prove His Acting Genius

7. Allen - Happiness

Without question the most difficult-to-watch film on this list, Todd Solondz's Happiness is a masterpiece of dark comedy, an extremely uncomfortable plunge into the ugliest, most eagerly repressed aspects of humanity, and Hoffman helps realise this through his character, Allen. Allen spends most of the movie making lewd phone calls to his neighbour, Helen (Lara Flynn Boyle), which requires Hoffman to enter an extremely unsavoury place, reciting lines that are both genuinely crude and hilariously desperate, particularly as he asks Helen about the state of her nether-regions while pleasuring himself down the phone to her. In a film boasting themes of rape, suicide and incest, Allen is practically a saint compared to what some of the other characters get up to, but like his role in Boogie Nights, he just about manages to imbue it with some sadness as well as car-crash hilarity. My love for this performance was renewed recently in the now-famous spoof trailer of Spike Jonze's Her (replacing Scarlett Johansson's voice with Hoffman's), which had several of Hoffman's quotes from this movie slotted in for good measure. Quote: "Are you wet? Is your p***y all wet?"