Back to Work

No, you did not go to summer camp with Gaby Hoffmann. Nor did she grow up on Elk Road across the street from your second cousin. And odds are, she probably doesn't go to the same gym as you. "I don't know what's wrong with me," Hoffmann says, "but when people come up to me thinking we went to camp together, I have a hard time telling them how they actually know me."

Hoffmann looks familiar because throughout the '90s, the wide-eyed little girl with the gap-toothed smile appeared in some of the decade's biggest box office hits, including Field of Dreams, Uncle Buck, Sleepless in Seattle and Now and Then. Along with Macaulay Culkin, Christina Ricci and Thora Birch, Hoffmann belonged to a crew of young actors -- the better-behaved heirs to the Brat Pack -- who populated a slew of films that were considered mediocre, if seminal to anyone born between 1980 and 1984.

These days, the 27-year-old spends her time back and forth between upstate New York, where she has a house with her boyfriend, and an apartment in the East Village. She looks very much like a country mouse in the city, with her hair in a messy bun and sporting a vintage Mexican peasant shirt and red clogs. Over a quiche and coffee at East Village café Ciao for Now, Hoffmann explains that after a ten-odd-year break from the industry, she's in the process of ever-so-gently dipping her toe back into the business, with small parts in two of 2010's most highly anticipated films: the new Todd Solondz movie, Life During Wartime, a sort-of sequel to 1998's Happiness, and Géla Babluani's English-language remake of his 2005 thriller 13 Tzameti. "I'm very slowly tiptoeing around the idea of being back at work as an actress," she explains.

Although Hoffmann spent her formative years growing up in front of the camera and on movie sets palling around with Meg Ryan and John Candy, she seems fairly un-traumatized by her past. "I pretty much had great experiences. No one ever demanded that I give anybody a blow-job or anything." That's not to say her childhood wasn't eminently strange. "The movie stuff never really fucked me up. I was never famous enough for that, but it was complicated in a lot of ways. Growing up, my whole life was really weird -- but it would've been weird anyway."

As a child, home for Hoffmann was a tiny apartment in the Chelsea Hotel, where she lived with her mother, Viva Hoffmann, a one-time Andy Warhol muse. "My mom would definitely take me out when I was younger," she recalls, "but it wasn't like Drew Barrymore-style, getting drunk and snorting coke off the bar. I remember going to Nell's, and my mom would sit upstairs with her friends, and I'd just go downstairs and dance."

She initially started acting because, "Honestly, we needed the money." Hoffmann was a precocious child, and a friend of Viva's suggested she audition for commercials. So she did, and according to Hoffman, "things just started happening." Her first film role at age seven was that of Kevin Costner's daughter in Field of Dreams, and after that it was one part after another. "When I was a kid," Hoffmann says, "I was only concerned with whether I had a friend on the set, if I could get a frozen hot chocolate at Serendipity after rehearsal, but then as I became a teenager, I wasn't creatively or intellectually turned on by these movies." And at some point, she says, "I just couldn't get to college fast enough. All I wanted to do was live in a dorm. I didn't think twice about walking away from work, and didn't think I would ever go back to acting."

She went to Bard, where she immersed herself in college life. But, she says, "I started to realize, 'Shit, I miss acting.' It was like this nagging feeling that I kept on trying to swat away. I was really in denial about it." So after graduating in 2004, Hoffmann slowly started to flirt with the idea of, as she puts it, "going back to work." She appeared in a few plays, including SubUrbia off-Broadway, in which she starred alongside Kieran Culkin.

"I feel like what I do now has absolutely nothing to do with what I did before college," Hoffmann says. And indeed, when talking with her about some of her early films, like Nora Ephron's underrated directorial debut This Is My Life and the classic '90s tween-fest Now and Then (whose plots she can barely remember), it's clear that Hoffmann has made a concerted effort to keep this part of her life firmly in the past. "I definitely remember making these movies, but I don't re-watch them and don't have much recollection of the films themselves."

It was an offer from Todd Solondz that convinced Hoffmann to return officially to the big screen. They'd been talking about collaborating off and on for a few years, and then finally, she says, "I heard Life During Wartime was going ahead, and Todd told me, 'Come to Puerto Rico!'" Which is how she found herself watching last November's election returns alongside the film's stars Allison Janney and Paul Reubens. "Watching Obama win the election with C.J. Cregg from The West Wing and Pee-wee Herman was weird and slightly surreal," she recalls.

Welcome back to showbiz.

Stylist: Luigi Tadini Fashion Intern: Natasha Gibbs Hair: Anthony Nader Makeup: Mary Douglas for www.marydouglas.com using Smashbox Cosmetics

Gaby wears a dress by Catherine Malandrino, bracelet by Lulu Frost, tights by Wolford and shoes by Vaneli.