By Dave Workman | Senior Editor
Months before his death from an apparent drug overdose, Academy Award-winning actor Philip Seymour Hoffman was the co-narrator of an anti-gun cartoon with backing from Mayors Against Illegal Guns, and he was remembered by MAIG Executive Director in a Twitter message as “a friend to our movement.”
Actor Philip Seymour Hoffman (1967-2014)
The 46-year-old Hoffman was found dead with a syringe still in his arm, in a Greenwich Village apartment he was renting, according to reports in the New York Daily News, New York Post and New York Times.
As news of his untimely death circulated through the firearms community, one man sent a private e-mail to TGM noting sarcastically, “If they had only outlawed heroin, he’d be alive today.”
Hoffman narrated, along with actress Julianne Moore, a short cartoon feature that was apparently the handiwork of MAIG in response to the Sandy Hook tragedy of December 2012. It repeatedly used the slogan “Demand Action,” which has become something of a battle cry of the gun prohibition lobby.
When police entered his apartment, according to published reports, investigators apparently found several envelopes that had been marked “Ace of Spaces.” That is a brand of heroin that “hasn’t been seen on the streets since around 2008 in Brooklyn,” according to the New York Post. They also reportedly found a burned spoon apparently used to cook the heroin.
In 2013, reports said, Hoffman checked into rehab to overcome his drug problems, and playwright David Bar Katz, who apparently found his body, said that a week before his death, Hoffman appeared “clean and sober.”
The anti-gun cartoon had participation from several cartoonists. It was an effort to stoke an emotional demand for more gun control.
Hoffman won a Best Actor Oscar for his lead performance in the 2005 hit Capote, a film about late author Truman Capote, author of “In Cold Blood.”
