At first glance, they have very little in common.
Cooper Hoffman is a born-and-bred New Yorker, the 22-year-old son of the late acting titan Philip Seymour Hoffman, who grew up around his parents’ creative circle and, as a kid, made iPhone action sequences with Paul Thomas Anderson. For 31-year-old David Jonsson, art was a saving grace in his working-class immigrant east London household, where he was taught by his cinephile dad to revere classic films like Malcolm X and Waiting to Exhale but whose reality was a world away from Hollywood.
But if you hear them tell it, those differences dissolved instantly when they met—it sounds, in fact, a little like love at first sight.
This was on the chemistry read for The Long Walk, an upcoming adaptation of Stephen King’s dystopian 1979 novel, going over scenes for Francis Lawrence, the director behind the blockbuster Hunger Games franchise. The success of the adaptation hinged on finding two actors who might initially seem starkly different but, later, telegraph a connection as intense as that between brothers.
“It was like I was on a first date,” Hoffman says, laughing. “I couldn’t stop smiling. I was like, ‘David, you might be the most charismatic person I’ve ever met in my life.’ ”
The boys spent a chunk of the read shooting the shit, talking about sports. “About the Knicks game the night before,” Jonsson explains. “And then we moved on to socc—.”
The Brit just about finishes that sentence before he realizes his grave misstep. “Fuckin’ football!” he corrects himself, turning to Hoffman in mock indignation. “You’re not getting into me! It’s pronounced football,” he says, slicing the word with gesticulating hands.
Hoffman cackles. “I’m rubbing off, sorry!”
“I love this guy from the top of my heart,” Jonsson says.
The two are regaling me with stories from their meet-cute while we’re lunching at an Italian restaurant in downtown Manhattan that Hoffman calls his spot. (It’s a family favorite, it turns out, the place where the Hoffman siblings celebrate their birthdays.)
The regular that he is, Hoffman holds court with an infectious joie de vivre, brandishing an iced Americano like a microphone and, without looking at the menu, ordering pici al limone, shishito peppers, and meatballs for the table. Sporting a gloriously lush beard, it’s clear the kid who made his debut in Licorice Pizza is already gone. The comparatively reserved Jonsson, meanwhile, strides into the restaurant in a tight tee and a workwear jacket slung over his shoulders, emanating quiet confidence—the key to acclaimed performances in recent films like Alien: Romulus and shows like HBO’s Industry, work that won him a BAFTA Rising Star Award. It’s been almost two years since that fateful chemistry test, and in the time since, the pair have become great friends.
So much so that, despite their warm welcome, I feel a little like a third wheel. The boys rib each other, mock the other’s responses, and gas each other up when they’re making a strong point. When I’m not bombarding them with questions, they’re sneakily catching up—Hoffman, for instance, following up on the restaurant-recommendation list he gave Jonsson.
This easy, affable hang is a far cry from how we see them in The Long Walk, sweating through their shirts, covered in blood, and traumatized by the dead bodies piling up around them. The movie is harrowing, a horror story about a group of young men pushed by a totalitarian regime to compete in a twisted, merciless version of a marathon, walking until there’s only one left alive. Hoffman and Jonsson play the story’s two main characters—the big-hearted Raymond Garraty (Hoffman), who joins the race with motivations that have to do with his late father, and the athletic, cocksure Peter McVries (Jonsson), the closest thing the competition has to a front-runner.
The Long Walk, director Francis Lawrence tells me on a call, is “about a time in a young man’s life where you’re really trying to figure out who you are.”
In that sense, there’s something a bit meta about the film. Around the pair, Lawrence built out a formidable 50-strong ensemble of talented young actors. And the production had the rare opportunity to shoot in chronological order. Meaning: As we’re watching the film, we’re watching the cast’s friendships being forged in real time. By the end, the director estimates that Hoffman and Jonsson covered around 350 miles on foot—not too far off from what their characters endured.
“It was long days,” Jonsson says. “Some days you felt motivated, and some days you didn’t. But we had each other…. It would be like, ‘Fuck it, boys, we’re going on a run.’ ”
“Bros are walking,” Hoffman quips, summing up the filming process. “Bros are trying to walk—”
“—As long as we can!” Jonsson finishes his sentence.
They are disarmingly giddy, but who wouldn’t be in their place? It’s a particularly exciting time to be a young actor in Hollywood. After a long drought where it seemed like leading men were forced into a single lane—and top talent was lost to tights-and-green-screen epics—there’s a new generation of emerging stars who are adept at balancing world-conquering box office fare with more grounded, character-driven work. The Long Walk promises to put Hoffman and Jonsson in that conversation too.
Hoffman, of course, led a cast of heavyweights like Sean Penn and Bradley Cooper in that outstanding performance in Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2021 semi-autobiographical drama Licorice Pizza.
Ethan Hawke, who directed Hoffman in the Flannery O’Connor biopic Wildcat, was struck by “a certain innate talent and a certain innate confidence” present in the actor. “There was something ferocious about him, and yet he was very fun and easy to be with.”
After his breakout turn as an ambitious gay banker in HBO’s addictive finance drama Industry, Jonsson has balanced quirky indies like the rom-com Rye Lane with the classic blockbuster bona fides of Alien: Romulus, which raked in an estimated $350 million worldwide.
“David has this rare ability to hold both vulnerability and danger in the same look,” says Alien: Romulus director Fede Álvarez. “There’s a softness in him, but also something unpredictable—like you’re never quite sure what’s coming next. That tension is magnetic—it’s the secret sauce that stars are made of.”
Both actors have also handily managed to eschew the trappings of contemporary male celebrity. They’re sitting out the Internet Boyfriend Wars and have yet to participate in the clout-hungry antics required for TikTok virality. In that way, Hoffman and Jonsson are a throwback to a kind of shaggy, authentic leading man that thrived in the late-’90s heyday of American indie cinema. They’re not shy about their ambitions, and they’re not afraid to talk their shit.
“I compare [shooting] the movie to Apocalypse Now,” Jonsson says about The Long Walk, breaking into a sly smile. “And inside that, I feel like I’m Marlon Brando.”
Hoffman breaks into a fit of laughter: “That’s fucking killing me!”
Growing up in east London, in an environment he describes as one “mixed with violence and frustration,” David Jonsson desperately needed a lifeline. “So many of the people I grew up with aren’t here,” he says. “It’s not a great place for a child to be sometimes.”
He found an outlet in theater, starring as Romeo in a local production of Romeo and Juliet and acting in a National Youth Theatre play. “Theater really transformed me and helped me use some of the stuff that I was struggling with and find a place for it,” he says. He would go on to study at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
Meanwhile, in art house cinemas, he got a crash course in film history, blown away by all-timer performances like Brando’s explosive turn in On the Waterfront and Gena Rowlands’s master class in A Woman Under the Influence. “That completely molded what I believe acting is,” he says. “These are people that risk something when they act.”
Looking at Jonsson’s own career choices, it’s clear he’s picked up some of that stomach for risk. After two seasons playing Gus on Industry, his big breakout role, he suddenly left the series just as it was becoming a major hit, willingly letting go of a sure thing in hand to roll the dice on new challenges. “You only get one life,” he explains. “Life is short, art is long.”
One of those new projects sees him stepping into showbiz legend Sammy Davis Jr.’s shoes in Colman Domingo’s feature directorial debut, Scandalous, about the then controversial interracial relationship between Davis Jr. and actor Kim Novak in the 1950s. (Sydney Sweeney is attached to play Novak.) Jonsson is, as Domingo wrote to me in an email, “like me…a leading man in a character actor’s body. He can do anything.”
Early this year, Jonsson was anointed as the star of Frank Ocean’s feverishly anticipated directorial debut. Details of the production are as scant and enigmatic as anything else Ocean works on. And though Jonsson is determined to remain similarly tight-lipped about the project, he says it happened “organically.” “I think he’s been a bit of a fan of my work, as I am his,” Jonsson says. “He reached out, which was really, really sweet, and we got talking.”
“I’m working with someone who is risking something,” Jonsson adds. “And if my expression can add to that, then that’s what you do.”
Even with everything else in the works, Jonsson isn’t done hustling—in May he announced that he’s already set up his own production company.
It’s not, he made clear to me, a place for vanity projects. Instead, he’s hoping to be able to provide a seat at the table to artists from similar backgrounds as his. “If everyone just takes from the pie, there’ll be nothing left,” he says. “You’ve got to take, make something, and put it back on the table for other people to have some…. I don’t want monopoly.”
Cooper Hoffman was determined not to be an actor. “I wanted to do everything but act, basically,” he says. The legacy of his father, who died in 2014 when Cooper was 10, loomed large. He even entertained the idea of becoming a fashion designer. “I wanted to go to, like, Central Saint Martins,” he says of his teenage whims, referring to the famous London fashion school.
Instead, at 17, an age when his peers were getting ready for college, he was urged by family friend P.T.A. to audition for Licorice Pizza. He nailed the part, suddenly announcing himself as a major talent and jump-starting a career.
Hoffman says he had his own version of college doing several movies—Licorice Pizza, Wildcat, Old Guy, and Saturday Night—in quick succession. Early this year came the final exam: making his stage debut in an off-Broadway revival of Sam Shepard’s Curse of the Starving Class. “I was like, I’m so ill-prepared for this,” he says.
He found himself thinking about his father. “The only person I really wanted to talk to was my dad,” he says.
“He’s my favorite actor, but he’s also my dad,” Hoffman continues. “He’s also not here. A lot of people idolize their parents because they’re great parents. It’s a different thing to idolize your parent because you love their art. So as much as I would love him to be here and talk to him about acting, I also would be terrified to have him see my stuff and judge my stuff. Not that he would judge it, because he was a very empathetic person, and he would probably—hopefully—hold my hand through all of it.”
“I get to figure this out on my own,” he says. “But also, I would love his advice. And I would also just love my dad.”
The Long Walk asked him to confront that loss directly. His character, Raymond Garraty, is a young man grieving the unexpected loss of his father who talks about trying to find his own way while keeping his dad’s memory alive, questions that Hoffman also frequently ruminates on. Watching him do so, with viewers bringing their own knowledge of Hoffman’s history, makes the walls between art and life feel especially thin.
He’s aware of this too. “My girlfriend was like, ‘Don’t use an interview as therapy,’ ” he says with a chuckle. “And I’m always like, ‘Yeah, but [the journalists] kind of know everything.’ ”
When I ask him if he had any apprehensions about the role, Hoffman is characteristically blunt: “Oh my God, how can you not?” he says. “How can you not see in bold letters, ‘HIS DAD DIED’? It’s just going to be there.”
Reading the script, the similarities between Hoffman and the character felt close to the bone, even when it came to the way they moved through the world. “When you experience death at a young age, you think that you’ve experienced everything in life,” he says. “And then you haven’t.”
Maybe they felt too close to the bone—to the point where initially, he says, he didn’t want to do the movie.
Going into his reading for Lawrence and the film’s casting agent, Hoffman chose not to memorize his lines and just read from his phone, a conscious bit of self-sabotage. After the reading, Hoffman tells me he was horrified by what he’d done, and deeply apologetic.
But the director, of course, knew what Hoffman would be stepping into. The elder Hoffman was filming The Hunger Games: Mockingjay—Part 2, directed by Lawrence, at the time of his passing. He, more than many directors, understood the challenge.
Eventually, Hoffman saw something of an opportunity in The Long Walk. “When your trauma is on display for the world, there’s no actually hiding it,” Hoffman says. “I’m like, I might as well talk about it, or, I might as well put it into something. Because if I keep hiding it and running from it, that’s not fair to anyone else who has gone through that. I’m here to display this person and this experience as honestly as I can, and hopefully someone else watches it and goes, He sees me, he understands me. And that’s, in my opinion, the only reason to do any sort of art.”
It seems, at least, that doing the film has liberated something in Hoffman. Recently, he wrapped filming on I Want Your Sex, a dominatrix drama directed by Gregg Araki that casts him, per the film’s description, as Olivia Wilde’s character’s “sexual muse.” At first spooked by the film’s nature and “all these weird outfits,” Hoffman decided that’s exactly why he needed to do it.
“He is making choices based on his gut instinct, without insecurities related to being a movie star ‘brand,’ or any of that dumb bullshit,” Wilde tells me in an email. “He commits to his work so completely, truly with every ounce of his being, that I think we can all feel his father’s similar dedication in his craft, but Cooper brings a distinct energy to the screen that is all his own.”
As we pick at the last few shishito peppers on the table, Hoffman and Jonsson talk about their next long, arduous journey: the impending global promotional tour for the movie.
“I’m excited to do press with him for the next however many months,” Hoffman says.
“You say that now….” Jonsson counters.
“And then I’m like, Oh my God. He brings his groomer and his stylist everywhere,” Hoffman jests to the seemingly always shoot-ready Jonsson. “Goddamn it!”
Toward the end of our time together, I ask Hoffman and Jonsson what they each wish for the future. I expect mentions of Oscars, maybe goals to direct. But despite their respective careers skyrocketing in different directions, they’re eager, they say, to grow together and continue collaborating through the years.
“There was a generation of actors back in the day, like people that we know now and we look up to. All these big actors that work with the same people on several different films,” Jonsson says, name-checking Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon. “I would love that to be the case, if I’m lucky, with Cooper.”
“I would love to spend another three months with him,” Hoffman echoes, serious all of a sudden. “This will hopefully be a friendship we get to continue having, on and off the screen.”
Raymond Ang is GQ’s associate director, editorial operations.
A version of this story originally appeared in the September 2025 issue of GQ with the title “Blood Brothers”
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Marie Tomanova
Styled by Marcus Allen
Hair by Barry White for barrywhitemensgrooming.com
Skin by Roberto Alvarado Jr. using Revive Skincare at Art Department
Tailoring by Ksenia Golub & Samantha McElrath
