You can't spell "Hack!" without Big H

What’s crazy to me about Phillip Seymour Hoffman dying of a heroin overdose is that he was the last person I would have guessed had an addiction to hard drugs. This exposes my total ignorance of the junkie personality but I think of them as people with very little self-control, both in the sense that they caved into doing hard drugs in the first place and because a junkie's free will is undercut by his or her cravings.

But Hoffman must have had superlative self-control to completely inhabit so many distinct and fully-developed characters like he did. I'm paraphrasing here, but Chris Connelly basically said Hoffman was the best at simultaneously exuding to an audience the image his character wanted to show the world and what he really was underneath. I think that is a very accurate description of the man's talent but it is so hard for me to reconcile someone having control over their persona top-to-bottom like that but being unable to constrain their animal urge for dopamine/serotonin. For someone to act like Hoffman did is the epitome of higher-order consciousness yet somehow he was killed by a base impulse: to get high.

First Hedburg, now Hoffman. Watch out Kate Hudson. Heroin works alphabetically.