JUNIOR MINT

Netting a legacy role on B&B has been a game-changer for Joshua Hoffman

- Stephanie Sloane

Joshua Hoffman doesn’t have to think too hard when asked to describe himself as a child. “I just did a project for my dad where I took all of the old camcorder footage that he had and digitized it,” the B&B newcomer begins. “So I got to see what I was actually like as a kid. I was very inquisitive; I was very interested in a lot of things. I liked to ask questions and I was always looking at things and studying them. I would either be very loud or very quiet. So I was a very, very dynamic kid. That’s how I describe myself.”

Performing, however, was not his first love — that was baseball — but it was through the sport that he wound up pursuing the arts as a career. “I’ve been playing baseball my whole life and my dad expected me to make it to the major leagues and my family believed that that was what I was going to do,” he says. “So I would play baseball for hours every single day and then every weekend, we would drive to a travel baseball team that I would play for and it was very intense. I was getting burned out by it and my mom noticed that and she was like, ‘Hey, you should go and act in a play,’ which couldn’t be farther than being on a baseball team in a 12-year-old’s mind. And I was like, ‘Uh, sure, that sounds interesting.’ ”

His first play was Oliver Twist, and Hoffman was instantly hooked. “I played the Artful Dodger and I was doing the accent every single day,” he relays. “I absolutely loved it. An agent came and saw it while she was on vacation and was like, ‘You should do acting.’ So that’s how I got started in acting.”