Cooper Hoffman confirms: The Long Walk was a lot of goddamn walking

The answer to the last one, at least, has been confirmed, per a new interview that the 22-year-old Hoffman did with Variety this week. The actor didn’t belabor this point as long as we would have, were we in his very beat-down shoes, but he made it clear: The walking in The Long Walk was long indeed. “Jesus, we went like 15 miles a day in 100-degree weather,” Hoffman recalls. “There are moments where you’re forced to be method actors. Whatever ‘method’ means to people. But we are walking. No one is faking that. And it is exhausting.”

Interestingly—but maybe necessarily—Hoffman also reveals that the film was shot entirely sequentially, including the fact that each of the 50 walker actors were sent home once their ticket gets punched in the film’s brutal, slow-walk-to-oblivion narrative. “When someone dies, the actor would get sent home,” Hoffman says. “They were done. We would tap each other on the back. That was just a recognition of, ‘You’re doing a good job. This is not our day. It’s your day and we’re going to be there for you.’” Which might explain why Hoffman and his dwindling number of castmates look so incredibly harrowed as Francis Lawrence’s movie goes on.

Elsewhere in the interview, Hoffman talks about dealing with raging insecurity after Licorice Pizza‘s success, comes to genuine life while talking about the Knicks, and seems understandably kind of annoyed with himself when forced to admit that the actor he admires most is, in fact, his father, the late Philip Seymour Hoffman. “It’s so annoying,” Hoffman says with clear understanding of how pat an answer it is. “It is my dad. That’s just the answer. I don’t have it with anyone else. I love a lot of actors, but there is a truthfulness that I think my dad brought. He’s a good one to look up to. I can’t hide that.”