'I had difficult experiences with male directors as a kid'

Ex-child star Gaby Hoffman plays a tragic mother in Netflix’s Eric’ and tells Annabel Nugent time away from acting gave her perspective and a total aversion to on-screen violence

- Annabel Nugent

How you know Gaby Hoffmann will depend largely on how frequently you get ID’d buying a bottle of wine at the shops. If the answer’s never, chances are you’ll recognise her as the child star of Eighties and Nineties family fare like Field of Dreams, Sleepless in Seattle and Uncle Buck. (Now 42, she still has the same chocolate pudding pools for eyes and a gap between her front teeth.) Those of a younger generation, though, are more likely to know her from zeitgeisty shows like Lena Dunham’s Girls or Transparent.

It’s a testament to Hoffmann that these credentials, albeit impressive, are the least interesting thing about her. Her life is full of anecdotes that relegate playing Kevin Costner’s daughter to footnote status. There was the time Carrie Fisher gave her a charm bracelet, the day Andy Warhol arrived at her front door with a toy dog under his arm, or the fateful night she and Christina Ricci, teenagers at the time, snuck into a downtown strip club to hang out with Courtney Love. “I had fun,” she grins now, all teeth. “It was a lot of fun.”

Even Hoffmann’s birth was noteworthy, ferried from hospital during a snowstorm to the storied Chelsea Hotel, where she lived for 12 years with her mother, the actor Viva, and stepsister. Think Eloise at the Plaza, if Eloise was the daughter of a Warhol muse and a soap star, and the Plaza was a dingy bohemian den for artists with a gay porn shop next door.