The Snapshot: In a dystopian America, 50 boys are chosen to enter The Long Walk, where the rules are simple. The last one standing wins untold riches and anything he wishes. Everyone else dies.
(The Long Walk is now showing in theaters)
Key Insights:
- Performance-driven success: Despite its bleak premise and minimalist setup, The Long Walk thrives because of the young ensemble cast, especially Hoffman and Jonsson.
- Casting impact: Cooper Hoffman’s open and empathetic presence was central to assembling the ensemble, with casting director Rich Delia highlighting his role as the project’s anchor.
- Career momentum: Both Hoffman and Jonsson are on sharp upward trajectories, with The Long Walk solidifying their positions as rising stars in Hollywood and beyond.
The Performances: There won’t be too many movies out this year more bleak than The Long Walk. Based on a Stephen King novella first published in 1979, it’s incredibly prescient in how society fetishizes violence as a form of entertainment. The totalitarian version of America in the story is alarmingly similar to the one in which we live today, and this annual Long Walk is one of the country’s most popular television shows. It’s not just bleak — it’s disturbing, unnerving and heartbreaking.
The trick of the movie, though, is that it’s essentially 100 minutes of young men walking and talking, with intermittent violent deaths thrown in. For many different reasons, the film shouldn’t work. It should be a boring slog. It isn’t, and that’s not just because of the way director Francis Lawrence sets the movie’s pace.
The movie works because of the performances of the actors who portray these (mostly) doomed walkers. Each and every one of them, even those who only have a single major moment, pop off the screen, making us care about them despite knowing that almost all of them will die by movie’s end.
None of these actors pop, though, quite like the movie’s star, Cooper Hoffman, and its secret weapon, David Jonsson. Hoffman stars as Ray, the protagonist through whose eyes we view the action. It’s Ray we meet first, being dropped off by his heartbroken mother (an always great Judy Greer) who knows the odds are that she will never see her only child again.
It’s Ray’s backstory we see in flashbacks, with everyone else’s coming out in conversation. It’s Ray we expect to outlast everyone else. No spoilers here as to whether or not that’s the case.
Hoffman has a warmth to his persona that his father — the late, truly great Philip Seymour Hoffman — never possessed. His dad never could have carried a movie like this one, and in fact, it was the younger Hoffman’s casting that allowed Lawrence and his casting director, Rich Delia, to assemble such a top-notch ensemble.
“Cooper has such an open, generous, amazing spirit and heart,” recalled Delia, who should be in contention for the first-ever casting director Oscar for his work here. “For that particular role, that’s really what you needed. Once that happened, the rest of it started to take shape around that.”
It shows, because a less accessible actor couldn’t hold the audience’s attention and empathy like Hoffman does, though he gets enormous help from Jonsson. The British actor, like his character McVries, is an onion to be peeled back one layer at a time. What starts as a cocky kid full of bravado slowly turns into a walking wound, a frayed nerve whose entire history is wracked with pain and suffering.
As much as the audience identifies with, and is rooting for Hoffman’s Ray, there comes a moment around the halfway point when McVries saves Ray, and the realization sets in that you’re rooting just as hard for McVries. Losing either one will be utterly heartbreaking, but we know from the start that this is how it has to happen. This, after all, is the whole point of the story, and there’s no Hunger Games out wherein we might get a pair of winners.
We’ve talked about chemistry here before, and the chemistry between Hoffman and Jonsson really is spectacular, but it’s much more than that. It’s about the way both actors make the audience fall in love with them, despite knowing for sure that it’s going to end horribly. That’s something not everyone can do, no matter how well written the script. The fact that both of them pull it off so well is a big reason why the movie succeeds as it does.
The Careers: There aren’t a lot of actors whose first-ever time in front of a TV or movie camera is as the star of a movie directed by a modern filmmaking master, but Cooper Hoffman is on that list. His first-ever role was as Gary, the lead role in Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2021 Oscar-nominated film Licorice Pizza.
By all accounts, he acquitted himself rather well in his debut, following it up by working with director Ethan Hawke in Wildcat, the actor-director’s movie about Flannery O’Connor, and then was legendary NBC executive Dick Ebersol in Jason Reitman’s movie Saturday Night, about the first episode of SNL. Both of those movies came out in 2024, as did Old Guy, in which he stars alongside Christoph Waltz as a young assassin being trained by Waltz’s older one.
This fall, aside from The Long Walk, Hoffman also has Maude Apatow’s directorial debut, Poetic License, which just premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. This series of starring roles for someone fresh out of the gate is certainly unusual, but the way Hoffman has performed, clearly it’s entirely warranted, and it will be fascinating to see what he does next.
Jonsson, meanwhile, is a decade older than the 22-year-old Hoffman, but plays a similar age well. He also has a completely different story from his co-star. He came up through the British TV system, appearing in shows like UNIT: The New Series, Endeavour and Deep State, before breaking through in the hit series Industry, in which he played young banker Gus Sackey.
His first starring role came in the charming indie gem Rye Lane, which is available to stream on Hulu and is absolutely worth your time. He has performed in several short films, before getting his next major role in the 2024 hit film Alien: Romulus, in which he played an android named Andy.
He also has a major film role in a movie that premiered in Toronto, the prison drama Wasteman, which earned solid reviews out of the festival. Like Hoffman, it’s the latest in what will be a series of starring roles in his future, all of which will be must-viewing.
Key Takeaways:
- The Long Walk could have been monotonous, but the layered, emotionally resonant performances elevate it into a gripping film.
- The chemistry between Hoffman and Jonsson is at the core of the movie’s impact, making their inevitable fates all the more devastating.
- With a growing list of acclaimed roles, Hoffman and Jonsson are poised to become leading actors of their generation.
You may also like:
- What Are Casting Directors Really Thinking on the Other Side of the Table?
- Rebecca Dealy on the Expectations of Casting Amazon’s Video Game Adaptation ‘Fallout’
- Rich Delia Shares Casting Insights on ‘The Long Walk’
